[Fwd: Election problems in Denver]

[Mary Eberle <m.eberle@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From Thursday's Rocky Mountain News

'Fundamentally flawed'
Consultant rips into Sequoia's vote wares, election commission
Evan Semon © News

Howard Cramer


By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News
November 30, 2006
Denver's Election Day debacle was caused by custom Sequoia software that
was "very poorly designed and fundamentally flawed," a consultant said
Wednesday.

"It does not meet or even approach professional standards," said Fred
Hessler, of Fujitsu Consulting, in his first report to Mayor John
Hickenlooper's task force examining the election mess.

Hessler was reporting on voter registration software that slowed to a
crawl and stopped, causing three-hour lines and leading an estimated
18,000 citizens to give up their attempt to cast a ballot.

Hessler said his team had 100 users open the first log-on page of the
software, and it slowed when only one person logged on. He said that's
because the program started accessing the database with that first page,
and it should not.

Users followed standard computer procedure and closed a page by hitting
the "x" in the upper right corner, but the program wasn't designed to
work that way.

"Ninety percent of users did not exit correctly," he said.

The software failed to close these open sessions even after three hours.

"These are not minor oversights or errors," he said. "This is
Programming 101."

The software was not stress-tested before the general election either by
Sequoia or Denver, he said, even though it was so unstable it could not
be used to train poll workers. Instead, they were trained on paper.

The Denver Election Commission, consisting of two elected commissioners
and a county clerk appointed by the mayor, agreed to pay Sequoia Voting
Systems $85,000 for the custom software.

But a Sequoia executive stunned the mayor's task force Wednesday by
saying Sequoia does not make such electronic pollbook software.

Howard Cramer, a Sequoia vice president based in Denver, said he didn't
even know his office had sold such a program to Denver until he heard it
on the news on election night, "and I started making phone calls."

Cramer, who spoke before Fujitsu's scathing review of his company's
work, said Sequoia makes only the voter registration database used by
Denver, which is meant to be printed.

Cramer said Denver hired Sequoia to build its e-pollbook software, which
checks off voters' names against the master voter list from remote
locations. This happened even though "Sequoia has no experience in an
e-poll book product," he said.

Cramer declined to answer when task force members asked if his company
should have stress-tested the software before the city relied on it for
70,000 voters on Election Day.

The election commission's technology chief, Anthony Rainey, has been
suspended after being blamed for many of the problems.

Overall, Fujitsu's Hessler said, the election commission revamped voting
and brought in new technology "with little to no testing or contingency
planning." He said the management and operational issues went beyond
technology.

He questioned why the election commission made the massive change to
vote centers - where any Denverite could cast a ballot and which
required the new e-poll book - in a year when it was already struggling
with new state and federal rules and new equipment.

Most cities around the nation did not do this, he said. Nor did they
have problems finding polling centers accessible to the disabled, as
Denver claimed it did.

He said the commission rejected Larimer County's electronic pollbook
without good reason. He said it had been tested with 1 million voters
and might well work for Denver.

Hickenlooper at one point summed up by asking his task force, "Is there
anyone here who doesn't believe there were a lot of bad decisions made?"

Seeing no objection, he moved on.

What's next

Mayor John Hickenlooper's election task force usually meets in the law
library of the Denver City and County Building:

*•* *10 a.m. Saturday:* Public hearing to take testimony about election
problems.

/imsea@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:imsea@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> or
303-954-5438/