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Secretary of State Charlie Daniels and a bipartisan Voting System Performance Review Committee are reviewing a report submitted by by InfoSentry Services that analyzed Arkansas’s recent primary and run-off elections. The report recommended that Arkansas renegotiate its contract with Election Systems & Software (ES&S) as a result of problems that ranged from reports of a lack of training and difficulty reaching vendor employees to delivery trucks that showed up unnannounced and misprinted ballots repaired with correction fluid.

According to Daniels, the report stated “Elections Systems & Software did not commit adequate resources to the Arkansas voting system project until after other states’ elections concluded [even when those other state’s contracts were signed after Arkansas’s], which was too late to allow sufficient testing, sufficient equipment programming, and ballot printing to meet critical early voting, absentee, and Election Day deadlines.” In response to this finding, the report recommends “ES&S…document to the State the names of every person at ES&S working on any component of the Arkansas voting system implementation project.”

In an article in the Helena Daily World, one county official described the experience of working with ES&S, "This was the most disorganized bunch ever to run an election in Arkansas. They were untruthful in their responses. Their performance left the burden of this election on us and greatly increased the cost."

“By about the middle of April, it started to become evident there were very serious problems,” he told the committee.

Election Systems and Software’s project manager for Arkansas sometimes spent more than 20 hours a day programming electronic ballots, he wrote. The project manager was not identified in the report, which also left out county officials’ names, but Newkirk identified her as Karen Hoyt-Stewart when asked by the committee.

He also wrote that the state wasn’t notified of staffing changes and recommended that Election Systems and Software alert the state of any such changes. Other recommendations included having the company stick to its delivery schedule and explain how it would avoid equipment delays and technical glitches.

Among the problems the report listed: Counties sometimes didn’t know when voting machines were to arrive, until the truck showed up; invoices from the company lacked details showing exactly what was being billed; and ballots were misprinted repeatedly in cases.

“On one site visit, we saw a county that had been reduced to using cut-and-paste techniques, along with ‘white out,’ in order to produce ballot master sheets from which to make ballot copies during the runoff election,” Newkirk wrote.

Name: Joyce McCloy - 2006-07-24 19:33:57 Comment: This was a big IT project, and Arkansas SOS left it all up to ES&S. They saw the train wreck coming, and instead of preparing contingency plans, they ended up with county election directors making ballots with their PCs, and printing them off of office computers. NC was prepared as of Dec 1 2005 in the event the vendor could not deliver and prepare for our state by early voting in April. The SBOE said that we might be voting on hand counted paper ballots if logistics did not work out. This is what Daniels should have done. Instead, he hired Glenn Newkirk to do a review of this. The vendor was badly overextended, but the buck stops with Daniels. Missed deadlines were definitely happening, but no backup plan set into place. Where was Arkansas' Project Manager, or did Arkansas rely completely on ES&S?