Expert: Revise voting-machines deal
Posted on Friday, July 21, 2006
Arkansas should renegotiate its contract with an electionmachine vendor because of the vendor’s troubled performance during the May 23 primary, a consultant told a state panel Thursday.
But his scathing report, which cited problems such as votingmachine delivery trucks showing up unannounced and misprinted ballots repaired with correction fluid, stopped short of saying the state should find a new company to manage its electronic voting program.
“We see no reason that Arkansas’ statewide voting system... cannot move forward to a successful general election,” Glenn Newkirk, a Raleigh, N. C., consultant retained by the state after the primary, concluded in an 85-page report released this week.
“Would we recommend getting rid of the vendor if we felt the vendor could not perform ? Yes,” he told the panel. “We don’t believe that’s the case here.”
His report, delivered to the Voting Performance Review Committee appointed by the secretary of state’s office, detailed the performance of Election Systems and Software. The Omaha, Neb.-based company signed a $ 15 million contract with Secretary of State Charlie Daniels’ office to furnish election equipment mandated under the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002.
Even Election Systems and Software officials have said they weren’t satisfied with the job they did and are working to make corrections before the Nov. 7 general election. Problems plagued the May 23 election at nearly every step — for example, absentee ballots were mailed late and some counties got a late start in early voting. The day of the election, some counties used paper ballots that election workers had to count by hand, slowing the tally.
“We are already changing the way we are approaching our work in Arkansas,” Election Systems and Software said in a statement e-mailed by spokesman Jill Friedman-Wilson.
She said the company is still reviewing the report. The company statement noted that the “voting technology itself worked well, and voters liked using it.”
“Most of the issues outlined in the report involve communication between ES&S, the counties we serve, and the Secretary of State’s office; training; and overall project management — not a rejection of the voting system itself,” the statement read.
Newkirk, the president of InfoSentry Services Inc., laid out 19 specific findings and 20 recommendations in his report. The committee will meet again July 31 to decide which recommendations to adopt.
Newkirk’s team visited six counties that had reported “substantial” problems: Benton, Jefferson, Lonoke, Pulaski, Saline and Searcy. They also interviewed secretary of state employees and Election Systems and Software personnel, although not everyone his team requested to meet was made available, Newkirk noted.
The consulting company also surveyed election officials in the 72 counties served under the contract, receiving a litany of complaints, including reports of a lack of training and difficulty reaching Election Systems and Software employees. County officials gave Election Systems and Software lower-than-average ratings in several areas. (Columbia, Ouachita and Union counties already had voting equipment that met federal and state standards, so they didn’t participate in the contract. )
“ES&S and the Secretary of State need to get their facts together. The Secretary of State would tell us something, ES&S would know nothing about it, or vice versa,” one county official wrote.
“It was difficult to get anyone to return our calls when we had questions. Many times, we were held up in preparing for the election process, waiting for responses that sometimes never came,” another wrote.
“Late and wrong !” one official wrote. “I had plenty of costly paper ballots because the programming was so bad and late.”
Newkirk’s report found that Election Systems and Software did not “commit adequate resources” to Arkansas until after other states held their primaries, “which was too late to allow sufficient testing, sufficient equipment programming and ballot printing to meet critical early voting, absentee and election day deadlines.”
“By about the middle of April, it started to become evident there were very serious problems,” he told the committee.
Election Systems and Software’s project manager for Arkansas sometimes spent more than 20 hours a day programming electronic ballots, he wrote. The project manager was not identified in the report, which also left out county officials’ names, but Newkirk identified her as Karen Hoyt-Stewart when asked by the committee.
He also wrote that the state wasn’t notified of staffing changes and recommended that Election Systems and Software alert the state of any such changes. Other recommendations included having the company stick to its delivery schedule and explain how it would avoid equipment delays and technical glitches.
Among the problems the report listed: Counties sometimes didn’t know when voting machines were to arrive, until the truck showed up; invoices from the company lacked details showing exactly what was being billed; and ballots were misprinted repeatedly in cases.
“On one site visit, we saw a county that had been reduced to using cut-and-paste techniques, along with ‘white out,’ in order to produce ballot master sheets from which to make ballot copies during the runoff election,” Newkirk wrote.
As for those incomplete invoices, Newkirk wrote: “Because the contract contained payable amounts for deliverables and services that were not forthcoming, the State should evaluate closely any ES&S invoices... and renegotiate the amount billed.”
Committee members and Daniels praised the report’s thoroughness.
“A lot of work has gone into this, and there’s been a lot of criticism,” said Carroll Garner, a committee member who sits on the state Board of Election Commissioners. “I think you’ve been quite critical, and I think you’ve given us some good recommendations.”
Daniels said, “Time is of the essence as far as making sure we have a good election this fall.”
The secretary of state’s office will issue a formal response to the report at the July 31 meeting, Deputy Secretary of State Janet Harris said.
“No state has experience implementing a statewide voting system. We didn’t have that here either,” she said.
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