A day after West Virginia secretary of state Betty Ireland held a press conference to address vote-switching problems with touchscreen voting machines made by Election Systems & Software, she presented an award of merit to an ES&S vice president, who had abruptly and mysteriously left the company in May after 11 years of service, according to the Charleston Gazette.
Gary Greenhalgh, as ES&S's vice president of sales, helped the company win a $17-million contract to supply machines to West Virginia in 2005 and was the company's point person for dealing with election officials until he left ES&S.
Reminiscent of the complaints against her husband, Jane Greenhalgh received her own complaint from Kanawha County this month after officials discovered that an ES&S sub-contractor had misprogrammed voting machine PCMCIA cards ahead of a state Supreme Court race. The programming error would have caused the machines to mis-record votes when a voter opted to vote a straight Republican ticket, but chose one Democratic candidate in the Supreme Court race. The state had to have the PCMCIA cards re-programmed quickly to keep Democratic votes from being discarded.