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Voting-system
firm has no bid
competition

It appears that the state will
again buy from the company
used in 1998

Legislature will not take up bill
requiring automatic recounts
in close elections

By Suzanne Tswei
Star-Bulletin

Election Systems & Software, whose malfunctioning voting machines in the 1998 election led to an unprecedented recount of more than 412,000 ballots, appears to be the only company left in the running to supply the state with a voting system for the upcoming elections.

Todd Mullen, ES&S project manager, said his company is the finalist among two other vendors competing to win the contract for the elections in 2000 and 2002. ES&S was the only company to demonstrate their system last week for election officials.

The state is scheduled to receive the final and best offers for the contract tomorrow, and announce its selection on March 3.

One of ES&S's chief competitors, Global Election Systems Inc. in Texas, dropped out from the competition because some of the state's demands are "unreasonable," said Howard Van Pelt, Global's president.

"It's the first time in the company's history that we did not bid," Van Pelt said. "Some of the specs were very onerous. We just didn't feel it would be good business."

Among its demands, the state asks that the winning bidder be responsible for damages resulting from problems beyond its control, such as mistakes in ballot printing, he said.

Global was also trying to sell the state a totally computerized system which would not use printed ballots, instead of the "optical scan technology" that was used in the last election, Van Pelt said.

But Yoshina has said such a system is too expensive for the state.

Sequoia Pacific Systems in California, another major competitor, also did not put in a bid, said Skip Webb, general manager. Sequoia provided the state with a punch card voting system before losing the contract to ES&S in the last election.

Problems in the 1998 election cost ES&S more than $500,000. The company paid $250,000 to the state to settle contract disputes and $280,000 for an audit of the votes after seven vote-counting machines malfunctioned. The recount verified the outcome of all state and local elections.

"We learned a lot from Hawaii the last time," Mullen said. One lesson was the difficulty posed by the time difference between the mainland and Hawaii. When Hawaii needed computer files changed and updated, workers in the company's headquarters had already gone home.

"This time, everyone will be on standby. I mean everybody," Mullen said, and more support personnel will be in the islands.

ES&S plans to provide more training for poll workers and simplify the steps for them to open and close the polls, he said.

ES&S also plans to conduct public education and a public-relations campaign to boost voter confidence.

ES&S was awarded the $1.675 million contract for the 1998 election without facing competition from other vendors. Yoshina said staff and budget cuts did not leave him with enough time to go through the procurement process. Instead, he awarded the contract on a "sole source" basis despite attempts by Global and Sequoia-Pacific to submit last-minute bids.

This time, the state put out a "request for proposals" asking for vendors interested in providing the state with a system like the one supplied by ES&S in 1998. The proposal asks for a system using "optical scan technology" that reads the ballots, collects, tabulates and consolidates the data.

Yoshina declined to comment about the selection for a new election system. Lloyd Unebasami, state procurement administrator, also declined comment, noting that the selection process must be kept secret according to state laws.

"It's not that we want to keep the information secret from the public. It's to keep it from the competitors to give the state the best advantage. This is done purely from a business point of view," Unebasami said.

Legislature will not take up bill requiring automatic recounts in close elections Star-Bulletin staff Malfunctioning vote-counting machines and close races in the 1998 election triggered bills proposing recounts of ballots in very close races, but the state Legislature has no plans to take up the issue this session. A bill requiring automatic recounts when the difference is within 0.5 percent of the vote totals between two leading candidates is stalled in the House Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs Committee. The Senate has no plans to hear similar bills either, said Sen. Matt Matsunaga. The bill was introduced by Rep. Roy Takumi, who won his 1998 race by eight votes. Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, who was an outspoken critic of how the 1998 election was handled, said there would be no need for recount legislation if the state acquires an election system that is reliable enough to keep the margin of error within 1 percent. "I always felt that it depends on the system that we finally end up with. The new system, whatever it is, should be able to address this issue" with a built-in method of recounting close races, she said.