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RE: the Hart contract
Paul (et al)
The PDF that you have online was the proposed contract and not the contract
that was signed. At my insistence all of the committee members have copies
of the actual contract that was signed. It took a few weeks for the Clerk to
provide it. I beat this up with both fists.
The contract was mostly authored by Hart. Throughout Attachment B (statement
of work) Hart calls out the "eSlate Electronic Voting System". In fact that
wording is just about everywhere. We don't have the eSlate system - we have
the BOSS system. One is not a subset of the other.
The reason for this wording is that Hart sells BOSS as an absentee only
ballot system and always sells eSlate first.
The worst thing that I found is in Section 7 of the SOW where system
acceptance is talked about. Hart wrote the specs for this with no county
input. 7.1 shows that Hart defines the specs and testing and that it must be
done within ten days of delivery. Repeated requests for the details of this
testing have gone unanswered. The county doesn't know how the testing was
done, and Hart thinks it is proprietary.
As far as I can tell, it could have been something along the lines of 'green
blinky led comes on'. The whole point of the acceptance testing was so that
Hart could be paid.
There are some very odd names for things in the contract. Such as the $60K
that we paid for VEO (Voter Outreach and Education). Tell me, when were we
educated by Hart about anything? Did we pay $60K to be told to use
ball-point pens to fill in the boxes? (we now know that magic markers and
crayons would have been more effective - which Hart claims that they'd said
all along)
Mike Harlan - county IT director negotiated this contract. Those that were
around in December of 03 might recall my constant yammering about having
members of CVV be Harlan's watchdog, or at least help him. Harlan doesn't
have a good history with IT contracts for the county. He might as well have
been working directly for the vendor. Our contract sucks, and that's because
it isn't our contract - it's Hart's contract.
Again - those that are paying attention will note that this issue with Hart
has received a good deal of attention. The county will need another contract
for support, and the ERC wants the county to write it, not Hart all by
themselves.
The contract was approved by commissioner Paul Danish on April 27th of 04.
Did Paul read it? I tend to doubt it. I think that he trusted the clerk, the
IT director, and purchasing to do that for him.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Walmsley [mailto:paul@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 11:54 AM
To: Ivan C Meek
Cc: Robert Mcgrath; attendees@xxxxxxx; Joe Pezzillo;
cvv-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; Goef Cahoon
Subject: RE: Re: Write-In Ballots
On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Ivan C Meek wrote:
> 3. (I suspect) the procurement contract didn't hold Hart's feet to the
> fire.
The contract language left a lot to be desired. It is posted here:
http://www.coloradovoter.net/moin.cgi/HartContract
As far as many of us could tell, Boulder County basically accepted Hart's
contract at face value. There are some real stinkers in there. For
example, the warranty cites the Hart manuals as their performance
standards. Ha ha ha. And if that wasn't bad enough, to add injury to
insult, the contract specifies that the manuals are Hart confidential
information, strictly not to be disclosed to the public. So the public
can't verify that the contract was complied with. Ha ha ha.
There were several public comments on the draft contract that were written
to the County Commissioners last year. They are available here:
http://coloradovoter.net/bocc/20040427/20040427-public-comments.pdf
http://coloradovoter.net/bocc/20040427/20040427-kolwicz-comment.pdf
And an audio recording of the BOCC meeting at which a small fraction of
these concerns were presented is available here:
http://www.coloradovoter.net/bocc/20040427/20040427-meeting.m3u
- Paul
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