Will Wisconsin be the Next Ohio or Florida?

I won’t go into the many, many reasons why the State Elections Board contract with Accenture creating the statewide voter registration system is bad. You can read more about it from an article I wrote on the subject for fightingbob.com.

However yesterday, Electionline.org, a non-partisan group with Pew Charitable Trust support, released their state-by-state report on the federal requirement under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) for the registration list. The findings?

* Nearly half the states missed the deadline of January 1, 2006 to have the list in place.

* 28 states signed contracts with outside vendors; 21 states had lists or did their list in-house.

* Accenture leads the list of firms with “bumps in the road”, with Kansas and Colorado canceling their contracts with them. Wisconsin and Wyoming remain as their clients.

* California has entered into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice allowing an interim database to be in place.

* Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska are working together on these issues.

Our system, already costing $27.5 million according to Electionline.org, will require additional funding from the state. As a comparison, Minnesota created their system in house for $4 million, according to Electionline.org.

Read the report. All I can say at this point is let’s not screw up our fall elections with a faulty system. To date, we have problems with the software Accenture has created, problems with training clerks on a convoluted system and problems with data entry of voter names.

If we roll out the list this fall, we could very likely have thousands of voters go to vote and not be on the list, including people who have voted in Wisconsin all their life. We could very likely be the next national joke, the next Ohio or Florida (where Accenture was involved as well).

But it’s all up to State Elections Board Director Kevin Kennedy. So far, he has been blind to criticism on the issue.

Kevin, you may be blind to it, but don’t also be deaf. Don’t “test” the list during Wisconsin’s fall election. The criticism you’ll get for that will be national, and that may be hard to keep ignoring.


PS. There is a new poll. Take it.