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Wis. lags other states on mandate

MADISON, Wis. (AP) Nearly a dozen other potential battleground states completed computer systems to confirm voter identities before Wisconsin, where a lawsuit threatens to throw the Nov. 4 election into chaos.

Each state's circumstances were different, but their success suggests Wisconsin election officials could have completed their system earlier, and avoided the costly and contentious lawsuit filed by its GOP attorney general — who also happens to run presidential candidate John McCain's campaign in the state.

"Surely they (other states) faced major problems as well. I think they're a demonstration that it could have been done effectively and on time," said University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin. "The system could have been up and operating a year ago."

But the state's top election official said it's not fair to compare Wisconsin to other states, which had more extensive voter information before the mandate went into effect.

"Those comparisons break down," said Kevin Kennedy, executive director of the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees Wisconsin elections. "Each step of the way we ran into problems."

The federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires each state to build an electronic list of registered voters that can be cross-checked against motor vehicle and Social Security records to confirm voters' identities. The act originally gave everyone until Jan. 1, 2004, to comply, but the federal government extended that deadline to Jan. 1, 2006, for 40 states after they complained they wouldn't be ready.

Wisconsin election officials didn't get their list done until mid-2006, and they just booted up their cross-referencing software in August. But the system is red-flagging about 20 percent of registrants for glitches such as typos or small differences in the same name across the data, such as a middle initial on a driver's license but not on the registration rolls.

The accountability board decided to run checks on registrants only from August forward and allow any non-matches to vote without consequence. Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a Republican and co-chairman of GOP presidential candidate John McCain's Wisconsin campaign, sued the board. He demanded they run the names of every registrant since Jan. 1, 2006, when the law took effect, remove ineligible voters from the rolls and do it by Election Day.

That could equate to checking tens of thousands of voters in days. Van Hollen contends anyone knocked off the rolls could still register at the polls or cast a provisional ballot. Political pundits warn that could create a Florida-like scenario where Wisconsin officials wouldn't know whether McCain or Democrat Barack Obama won for days. Democrats accuse Van Hollen of trying to suppress voter turnout.

At least nine other swing states, including Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Missouri, were able to make it work and beat Wisconsin to a finished system by months or more.

Colorado was the latest, getting its system up in April, although that state was doing cross-checks on voters as information on them came in over 2007.

Some states had an edge. Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia, for example, already had statewide voter lists before HAVA took effect. Some states had smaller populations and fewer registrants.

But other states faced stiff challenges, from compiling voter names from locals to troubles with computer vendors. New Hampshire got its cross-checks up by spring 2006, but election workers there had to consolidate voter names across a variety of formats, from old-fashioned paper lists to spreadsheets, as well as train locals on the system and teach them to clean up data.

Richard Coolidge, a spokesman for Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, blamed delays in that state on computer contractor Accenture. The state canceled its $10.5 million contract with the company in 2005. Florida, Kansas, Wyoming and Wisconsin all canceled their contracts with Accenture as well over delays.

Wisconsin's Kennedy said election officials here faced unique challenges. For starters, the state had no centralized voter registration list, which meant workers had to build it from scratch.

Many states run elections at the county level, resulting in countywide voter registrations that made building a statewide roster easier. Colorado had to deal with only 64 counties. In Wisconsin, municipal clerks run elections, which meant election workers had to canvass about 1,800 jurisdictions for voter information.

And before HAVA, voters in Wisconsin communities with populations fewer than 5,000 — about 1,500 villages and towns — never had to register. State workers had to send cards to voters in those communities to gather information from them for the first time.

Still, Kennedy said, the state got its list together by the summer of 2006.

The real problems began when Accenture, which won the state's bidding process to build the computerized system, began to fall behind in 2005, Kennedy said. The company's contract called for it to deliver a full operation product by March 2006, but a 2007 audit found the system still couldn't track ineligible voters and failed test runs. The state finally nixed the $14 million contract in December of that year.

Accenture officials have said they fulfilled the contract, but state workers may not have entered data correctly and the state wanted changes that went beyond the deal's scope.

The state Department of Administration, which was responsible for enabling data sharing between the list and other state databases, had problems getting that to work, too, Kennedy added.

Even with the delays, government watchdog group Common Cause still gave Wisconsin some of its highest marks in a report this month on improvements 10 swing states have made in their election administration. The report gave Wisconsin an "exemplary" grade on voter identification, poll worker distribution and HAVA name-matching standards.