Editorial: No excuse for silence about change at county elections office
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The person in charge of Westmoreland County’s elections bureau is out of the office. Kind of. Maybe?
It’s hard to tell because no one is talking about what’s going on.
The county commissioners met Tuesday as the election board, doing pro forma tasks such as certifying the final numbers for 14 primary races after write-in tallies.
But Director JoAnn Sebastiani wasn’t present. Public Works Director Greg McCloskey stood in her place, as he did starting June 8 when the commissioners suspended Sebastiani with pay. That suspension was due to expire Friday, but after the Flag Day holiday Monday, she still was not in the courthouse Tuesday.
What did the commissioners have to say about that? No comment. Solicitor Melissa Guiddy declined as well, saying the county couldn’t address “pending personnel matters.”
If all this sounds familiar, it should. It’s a favorite tune in Westmoreland County government — and it appears to get a lot of play in the elections office.
Sebastiani took the reins from interim director Scott Sistek in August when she moved over from her position as deputy of the county tax office.
“She has the ability to learn, and when she came to the tax office she didn’t have the experience there either,” said county Commissioner Sean Kertes at the time, affirming his “total faith” in Sebastiani.
Sistek was moved back to deputy director. But six weeks later, he was suspended with pay. A week later, that became unpaid. On Oct. 1, the firing was official, just a month before the 2020 presidential election as the county was gearing up to hire a large number of workers to get the job done.
No reasons were given. Commissioner Doug Chew said it was not politically motivated and unrelated to the election. Sebastiani declined to comment.
Oh well, two times isn’t a pattern, right?
But Sistek took the interim job after the resignation of Beth Lechman. Kertes again declined to comment in August when that happened, after Lechman had been out of the office for several weeks.
“We have faith in the operations of the elections bureau,” he said, two months after the 2020 primary and three months before the general election.
It is entirely possible — even likely — that this series of shake-ups are completely unrelated to each other.
The pattern, however, is in the opacity of the process.
A resignation can be as simple as retirement or wanting a change, especially from a high-responsibility position during a high-pressure year. But two suspensions and at least one firing suggest issues that have not been fully discussed.
At a time when the reliability and integrity of the election process is being hotly addressed in almost every corner of the country, radio silence on the topic of three leadership changes in the county election office in less than a year is an awkward absence.