Relating to the Los Angeles County Registrar's Office (Conny B. McCormack)
The LA County Registrar had created an Election Consulting firm (GOE Corporation) in which Conny and her husband Austin, served as President and CFO. Using money from HAVA (grant) the firm helped produce an election video to champion the nonuse of individual voting machine printers in the VVPAT process recommended by HAVA (Help America Vote - Act). Money has been paid from County funds to Austin McCormack in aid of the production of this video. The payments were deposited to Conny's GOE corporate account - taking advantage of her government position to siphon off Federal funds into her own private account.
At this time we know that
money from the LA County office of the Registrar was used to pay expenses for
Austin to travel to Las Vegas to help produce a DVD that promotes the fact that
paper trail printers on each individual voting machine are not effective. The
number of DVD's that were distributed is unknown, but we obtained a copy. Here
is the picture of the actual DVD
.
For more depth you can view a short excerpt of
the video. A full length version of the video can be found here
(27MB). There were obviously other costs associated with this production,
e.g. DVD editing and production, DVD duplication, costs of obtaining releases
for actors, etc. The actual cost of the production is unknown and the source
of funds for these items is unknown.
Checks were issued to Austin
from LA County to reimburse him for travel and other expenses. Two checks were
issued to Austin McCormack and both were approved by Conny McCormack. Checks
like this must go through an approval process in the Los Angeles County financial
system and must be approved by someone in authority. Here are the approvals
... (expense Report #1
.
Expense Report #2
)
The first check for $422.34
is for travel. meals, car rental, and return trip airfare on 10/28/04 and expenses
as outlined on this Expense
report page .
The check was issued on 12/23/04 and delivered to Austin on 12/30/04. Here is
the transmittal document
.
The check was cashed by Austin (he endorsed the check to Conny McCormack and
she deposited the check to GOE Corporation. A copy of the front and back of
the check is here 
Another check for $466.59
was for an overnight trip to Vegas, hotel, meals, car rental and return trip
airfare on 11/01/04 and expenses as outlined on this Expense
report page .
The check was issued on 12/23/04 and delivered to Austin on 12/30/04. Here is
the transmittal document
.
The check was cashed by Austin (he endorsed the check to Conny McCormack and
she deposited the check to GOE Corporation. A copy of the front and back of
the check is here 
A complaint has been filed on October 30, 2007 with the State of California, Elections Division, to initiate the process of getting this money back to the taxpayers. In addition we feel that Conny McCormack has abused her office and should be penalized for taking advantage of her position to steal money from the County of Los Angeles and funnel this money to her own account. She certainly should be banned from doing any election consulting with her own private firm. The first few pages of the complaint (a lengthy document of 110 pages) are linked below.
HAVA Complaint part 1 (page 1, page 2, page 3)
Note: On December 7, 2007, we received a verbal phone message from the Sectretary of State, HAVA official, acknowledging receipt of the Complaint and our addendum (filed November 27, 2007). The message indicated that further disposition of the complaint could take up to 90 days from the date of receipt. Even though it is apparent to the reader of this page that there is an obvious act of mis-conduct with HAVA money, the State of California can take up to 90 days to figure it out. It took 37 days just to acknowledge receipt of the complaint and as yet a complaint number has yet to be assigned.
Effectively, Conny has stolen taxpayer's money and deposited it in her own private account. We notified the LA County Auditor, J. Tyler McCauley, but he chose to hide the bank account number for the GOE Corporation so that we are unable to investigate further. (Letter from the Auditor). Even though we classify this as Grand Theft (over $400).
Corruption in our government offices abounds because there is no effective enforcement or investigative department that will actually look into a clearly criminal action like the one described above possibly because the amount is too small to draw enough attention. We feel that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that other unnecessary expense money has also gone the same way from the original $2.5 million dollar grant.
