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Elections Board addresses voter registration list problems
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by Carolyn Smith
Thursday, September 29, 2005
The Wisconsin State Elections Board addressed recent problems with the federally mandated Statewide Voter Registration System, or SVRS, at a meeting Wednesday in Madison.
In Wisconsin, it is the job of the State Elections Board to get the system up and running by the end of the year. However, the board announced last week it has been having difficulty with software providers and may not meet the deadline.
In 2002, the federal government passed the Help America Vote Act, which has provided funding to all 50 states to compile registration lists for each state's voters. Under the provisions of the act, each state has a deadline of Jan. 1, 2006, to have a voter registration system in place, or else risk losing federal HAVA funding.
"We have been charged with the implementation of the HAVA Act," Election Board Public Information Officer Kyle Richmond said. "And we're still trying to comply with it."
The board signed a controversial contract with Accenture LLP to get the state's registration system in place, but the company has not been meeting contractual agreements, Richmond said.
"The thing people will have to understand is the software is not done, but we think the software will be fixed in October," Richmond said, adding the firm has been having difficulty with "bugs" in the system software.
State Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, said the state might opt to sue Accenture if it doesn't rectify these problems.
"Accenture has had a really bad history both in Wisconsin and other states in meeting deadlines and having cost overruns," Pocan said. "We are currently experiencing that ourselves."
Pocan said one reason Accenture has been having difficulty meeting its contract with the state is because the company previously cut back on the number of employees working on the registration software.
"We've had missed deadlines for five of the last nine months, and they're just starting to put some extra workers on it," Pocan said.
In addition to the software problems, Richmond said it might take the SVRS staff longer than the deadline to train clerks and elections staff to use the SVRS, due in part to the small size of the agency.
The board will have to train 1,825 clerks and election staff members before the deadline, which Richmond said is not likely to happen.
"We still have a lot of training of people to do and that's why we [said] we won't be ready by the deadline," Richmond said. "We took our responsibility to inform the public that we won't be ready very seriously."
Though the system will not be ready in smaller areas, larger municipalities, such as Madison, Milwaukee and Green Bay, will have a viable system ready in time.
"We intend to have [SVRS] deployed to the municipalities, which would be about 65 percent of Wisconsin voters, by the deadline," Richmond said.
The remaining areas will have operable systems between the primary elections that take place during the first week of February and the beginning of April when general elections are held.
