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Jeb! knew of purge list problems

Jeb! knew. He knew that the Florida voter purge list was full of problems. But he went ahead and ordered elections supervisors to use it anyway.

Well before they abruptly discarded it, Florida election officials knew they had significant problems with a database of felons they planned to use in removing voters from the rolls.

Just a week before they directed local election chiefs to begin purging ineligible voters from the list of 48,000 convicted felons, state officials documented two years of failures and breakdowns with the $2.7 million contract with database vendor Accenture.

A May 2 internal memo, ordered personally by Secretary of State Glenda Hood, details a half dozen missed deadlines and broken promises, failed software programs, repeated miscues and personnel problems.
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Critics who have closely monitored Florida's voting process say the chronology shows that the state was negligent.

''This memo is striking,'' said Howard Simon, Florida director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ``After two years of constant failures and fixes . . . they rushed this out the door.

``We are talking about one of our most fundamental rights, the right to vote. Maybe they should have considered the possibility that accuracy was more important than speed.''

State officials say their intentions were merely to remove ineligible voters. In Florida, convicted felons cannot vote unless the right is restored.

MOVING SWIFTLY

Yet a former official involved in the process acknowledged that the state was moving rapidly.

'We were quickly approaching the `drop dead' date, when we knew it would be too late to put it out there for the election,'' Ed Kast, the former director of the Division of Elections, who retired in June, said in an interview.

''Of course we were frustrated. We all wanted to know why it couldn't get done faster,'' he said.

Executives at Accenture, one of the world's largest technology consulting firms, were caught unaware by the memo when contacted by The Herald. The newspaper obtained it in a public records request.

''We've never seen this document before,'' said Jim McAvoy, spokesman for Accenture.

He acknowledged some ``technical and staffing issues, which resulted in a delay of approximately five months.''

But he said the state asked for many changes that helped exacerbate delays. He declined to discuss specific details of the memo, saying the company intends to discuss them first with state auditors looking into the problems.

The memo came just days before state officials were going to order local election chiefs to use the database to remove thousands of ineligible voters.

The “Timeline Overview,” (pdf link) which appears to be at least part of what The Herald got from the state, makes for fascinating reading, at least for a computer guy like myself.

Database manipulation can be complex and tedious. There are invariably unforeseen outcomes when you try to weed out large blocks of data. I’m not a database expert, but I do know that much.

A quick example: say you want to extract every person from the phone book whose last name is Smith. You design a routine in which the data is read and, you hope, all Smiths are written to a report or a new file. Unfortunately, although you are passingly familiar with databases in general, you have never seen the particular piece of software that you’re using to play with this data. Perhaps due to your lack of familiarity with this software, you leave out an important qualifier in your search for Smiths. Instead of just Smiths, you end up with Smithsons and Aerosmiths, and every other person with the letters “SMITH” located somewhere in their name.

Now, this would probably be an easy enough problem to fix, but you would need time to figure out where you went wrong, and more time to figure out how to do things right. Perfectly understandable.

Unless you’re an international data processing company with a large contract in which you purport to be competent to perform these operations. Then it’s not so understandable.

But wait - what if high level people, both in state government and within the company that is hired by the state, decided to throw a monkey wrench or two into the process. By seeing to it that project managers resign, by assigning inexperienced database administrators, and by endlessly reviewing and re-reviewing change orders and procedures, the work could be delayed to the point that pressure to meet deadline begins to trump quality concerns. Why, if the release date is delayed long enough, there might be so much confusion and competing claims of various levels of reliability, combined with pressure put on elections supervisors to purge purge purge, that all or at least most of the “mistakes” could remain largely unnoticed until well after election day.

Hmmm, that scenario certainly makes Accenture’s apparent incompetence a little more understandable.

Luckily, a court ordered Jeb! to make the originally super-secret felon purge list public, and tons of mistakes immediately came to light. Unfortunately, although the state has officially said that use of the list is no longer required, individual county elections supervisors are still free to use this list as they see fit. They may still choose to use the list to scrub voters from their county’s rolls and to illegally disenfranchise voters who have every right to participate in this year’s elections.

It sure would be nice if a real newspaper like The Herald could write a little article detailing exactly which supervisors still plan to use this very flawed purge list and how they plan to use it.