Courier Times "Thumbs Down" 5/12/07 "To the Bucks County Commissioners for not releasing information that helped them choose the Danaher voting machines. Their decision was based, in part, on a report issued by a group of county employees that said operating the Danaher machines would cost taxpayers nearly $600,000 less that the optical scan machines.  But after Sandy Schiff of the advocacy group Coalition for Voting Integrity asked to see where the numbers came from, she got a letter from the assistant county solicitor that said that the "attached cost estimate sheets" referenced in the report were never generated, and that any "work products" reflecting "pre-decisional deliberative aspects of the decision making process" would not be made public.

 

"Board of Elections director Deena Dean has said that she would look for the documents; good thing, because Shiff's question is a reasonable one.  This is taxpayer money we're talking about, and anything cited by the commissioners as a determining factor in how it gets spent needs to be easily accessible to the ones footing the bill.  Unfortunately, this attitude doesn't seem to be limited to county politicians..."