Contract news…The State Elections Office is seeking approval for an emergency $9 million 1-year contract with Hart InterCivic Inc. for an electronic voting system to conduct this year’s elections. The request for an exemption from the regular procurement process comes after an appeal of the contract award by a competing vendor, Election Systems & Software Inc. The contract being appealed would run for 10 years. Hart’s bid of $43 million was considerably higher than the $18 million bid by ESS.
The elections office says it is out of time and needs to sign a deal with Hart immediately in order to get the system in place in time to handle the September primary election.
Both the Hart InterCivic system and the state’s contract award to the company have spawned controversy. Background available from Safe Vote Hawaii includes this discussion from 2006 as well as a listing of recent news stories.
The filing with the State Procurement Office includes documents from the contract protest and appeal filed by ESS in February 2008 (ESS protest, opinion denying the protest and ESS request for hearing, cost analysis by elections office).
The State Procurement Office also turned down a request by the Department of Health to approve an emergency $59,000 nonbid contract for a new system to monitor VOG levels on the Big Island. The system was intended to replace a decade-old air monitoring system. The procurement office said the Health Department failed to provide “sufficient justification” for bypassing normal competitive procurement procedures. Given the vog problem recently, the DOH failure to provide an adequate justification appears to just be the result of underworking on the request.
And here’s a data source I just ran across, the Hawaii Business Research Library. Despite the cluttered web site, it’s a gold mine of information. They’ve also got a blog that provides updates. There’s enough there to keep you entertained for a while. For example, try searching the Thomson Gale database for business articles from a variety of publications. I did a sample “superferry” search, just for fun, and came up a long list of stories.
1 response so far ↓
1 Bartman // May 15, 2008 at 8:06 am
Thanks for the head’s up. The Office of Elections does a good job…of not publicizing these things.
The current predicament is the State’s own doing. The contract to Hart was extravagantly overpriced–almost three times as expensive as the next rated proposal from ES&S.
ES&S has been counting about 95% of the ballots cast in each of the last several Hawaii elections, using their optical scan machines. Hart has counted about 5% on its DREs (electronic voting machines). ES&S has much more experience, both here in Hawai and on the Mainland.
The Office of Elections has had a sweetheart relationship with Hart for the last three procurement cycles, bending the rules and skewing the evaluation process in order to award contracts to Hart. This last round, as over=priced as it was, should be the last straw and the State Procurement hearing officer agreed to hold back the contract.
In its typical fashion, the OoE has been fairly tight-lipped about the details, so it is difficult to know what options are available to them at this late date. We need some sort of voting system in place for the September primary. I do not know if the equipment from last election is still on island, but as a stop gap solution, I think it makes sense to negotiate an emergency one-time extension of the two previous contracts and used the same system as we did in the last election. ES&S optical scan machines for the vast majority of the votes cast and Hart DREs (with printers) providing the handicapped accessibility features required by the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
These systems are familiar to both the voters AND the staff and volunteers who will conduct the elections, which reduces the re-training necessary to learn a completely new system.
Would the two vendors be willing to go along with such an arrangement, and for a reasonable price? I don’t know, but I suspect each of them wants to win the eventual multi-year contract, so I think the answer would be yes.
Meanwhile, the contested contract dispute can be properly adjudicated. From my viewpoint, the award of the contract was totally inappropriate and as deserving of a legislative hearing as Ted Liu’s attempt to award the DBEDT contract to a less unqualified company. The OoE should not be allowed to use the current emergency of its own making as an excuse to go ahead and award this extravagantly priced contract.
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