Officials Decry Time, Effort Wasted On Voting Machine Debacle

By John Voket

They chose their words carefully, but every local official who commented on the latest development in Connecticut’s electronic voting machine folly expressed frustration or dismay that the process had temporarily ground to a halt. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz had pulled the plug, at least temporarily, on plans to buy high-tech voting machines for the 2006 elections.

The secretary of the state said the finalist in the bid process, Simsbury-based Danaher Controls, misled the state and had not yet sought proper certification to meet state and federal requirements. Ms Bysiewicz’s office made the discovery during final negotiations with the company.

Other voting machine companies, she said, also failed to meet the state’s needs. Eight firms responded to the state’s request for proposals.

“Unfortunately we were unable to find qualified vendors,” she said, adding that no company could provide a certified electronic machine that displays a voter’s entire ballot and provides a paper receipt that he or she can verify.

During his report to the Legislative Council later Wednesday evening, First Selectman Herb Rosenthal said that the secretary of the state had finally acted on a recommendation that had been suggested to her by the state Registrars of Voters Association some time ago. Mr Rosenthal said he was somewhat relieved that Newtown and other Connecticut communities would not be rushed to budget, purchase, acquire and train voting officials and poll workers in short order for the 2006 elections.

“It would have been quite an effort to get all that changed over before the election,” Mr Rosenthal said.

The first selectman echoed comments from Town Clerk Cynthia Simon, who was somewhat more pointed in her observation of the process to date.

“When I think of all the time, all the energy… and now they are back to square one,” Ms Simon said. “If I was the secretary of the state, right now I’d be sitting there with egg on my face.”

Ms Simon, who is the chief voting official for the town, said she could not understand why the secretary of the state expended so much effort and expense in promoting both the process, and three electronic machines that were finalists in a protracted RFP process, when it turned out none of those machines were qualified for use in the state.

Neither of the computerized machines from two other RFP participants, Diebold and Avante, displayed full-face ballots, which is a requirement of state voting statutes, Ms Simon said.

“Why weren’t we looking all along at other full-face machines?” she asked.

State law has been interpreted as requiring that any voting machine must show the entire ballot for a voter. State officials are looking into whether that requirement applies to electronic voting machines. Also, a recent new law requires that a person’s vote be verified by some sort of paper trail.

Ms Bysiewicz’s decision to stop the procurement process comes after the US Election Assistance Commission said Connecticut’s old mechanical machines do not comply with the federal Help America Vote Act, which requires voting machines to be fully accessible to disabled voters.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said his office has contacted the US Department of Justice to make sure it understands Connecticut’s situation and does not penalize the state for the delay.

“We’re satisfied that this decision is legally sound,” Mr Blumenthal said, referring to Bysiewicz’s decision to stop the process. In a letter to state officials, the Department of Justice said it is willing to “work cooperatively with Connecticut” on achieving full compliance with the federal law.

Local Registrars of Voters LeReine Frampton and Karen Aurelia also expressed frustration that the secretary of the state’s office was operating in the dark, while keeping local registrars all but removed from the process of qualifying and selecting the technology they would be expected to acquire and maintain in local voting precincts.

“If anything, this situation gives us more time to get the financial and training plans in order,” Ms Aurelia said. “We were all in a panic because so many [of the requirements and details] got sprung on us so late.”

Ms Frampton said she was most upset because her office is required by law to keep within a submitted budget, a prospect made more difficult by the secretary of the state’s office because of ongoing delays in getting real information to local officials about how the procurement program was progressing.

“They had us jumping through all these hoops,” Ms Frampton said. “We were trying to do our budgets and we just couldn’t get any answers.”

Ms Frampton reiterated what Mr Rosenthal said regarding her state association’s advice to scrap the procedure months ago and start again by including bidders that had developed appropriate, certified technology since the original state RFP process closed early in 2005.

“This was something the secretary of the state was being told,” Ms Frampton said. “If anything, they should have ended the process on December 7 when they threw out the other two [RFP finalists].

“It’s not fair the way our registrars were treated. Some budgets were delayed, decisions had to be made, and I feel the entire process was mishandled from the start,” she said. “Look, it was initiated four years ago when the HAVA legislation passed. And it all came down to the last minute, it all falls down on [the local registrars.]”

The president of the state’s registrar of voters association and two professors who questioned the state’s bidding process said they were pleased that Ms Bysiewicz decided to stop everything.

“I haven’t met one single registrar that I’ve talked to in the last six months who’s been happy about this process. It’s been flawed since Day One,” said Richard J. Abbate, who had asked Ms Bysiewicz to open the process to other bidders. Mr Abbate has been rumored to be seeking statewide endorsement to run against Ms Bysiewicz for the secretary of  the state seat in 2006.

TrueVoteConnecticut, founded by two professors from Yale University and Trinity College, has also been calling on Ms Bysiewicz for months to start the process over again. One of the organization’s initial press conferences announcing their call to scrap the RFP process was held in Newtown last spring.

“I commend the secretary for doing the right thing and throwing the process open rather than acquiring an inferior machine for the state, which all the indications up until now were that that was going happen,” said Michael Fischer, a computer science professor at Yale.

Following the recent move by the secretary of the state, Connecticut voters will be permitted to use the old, mechanical lever machines for statewide elections in November. In the meantime, the state plans to contact all voting machine companies across the country, and ask them to apply or reapply to provide new machines.

Ms Bysiewicz said Connecticut will work with federal authorities and the State of New York, which has some of the same requirements, to seek the right devices.

Ms Bysiewicz said she hopes that new electronic voting machines will be in place for the 2007 election, replacing the 3,300 old lever-style voting machines. Connecticut has already received $32 million from the federal government to buy replacement machines through the Help America Vote Act of 2002.