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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dr. Id who wrote (141938)	7/29/2004 5:09:18 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

There's this story floating around about Florida. A few notes: The move follows Hood's call last week for auditors to focus on errors that forced her to scrap a list of almost 48,000 potential felons who could have been purged from the voter rolls before this year's elections. "We are committed to ensuring successful elections in which every eligible voter can exercise his or her right to vote," Hood said. The inspector general's entry is expected to help Hood track the scope of problems involving voter eligibility and how felons are removed from voter rolls, said Hood spokeswoman Jenny Nash. The broader review follows reports that a private company, DBT, which built a similar potential felons list used four years ago, had warned state elections officials in at least 1998 that a glitch existed that could exclude Hispanics. The latest potential felon database was scrapped after the news media reported it included only 61 Hispanic surnames because of a conflict between voter rolls and Florida Department of Law Enforcement records. orlandosentinel.com And who came up with this database? New York-based Accenture was involved in creating a database of felons and dead people to help counties take them off voting rolls, but that database turned out to be so flawed - it omitted many hispanics, for one thing - that Bush scrapped it earlier this month. miami.com And how was this discovered? Nor have they explained why the felon list was so inaccurate. Florida leaders have had four years to correct the problems that turned many eligible voters away from the polls in 2000. They paid $4.2 million to Accenture, a spinoff of Arthur Andersen, to prepare the purge list. Yet the list wasn't available until last month -- and wasn't revealed until CNN and other news organizations sued to get it. Somehow, I doubt that Fox News was a party to that suit, fairandbalanced though they might allegedly be. And who is this Accenture? The State Technology Office failed to justify the need for and might not have competitively bid contracts worth $325 million that were won by two politically connected private firms, according to a state audit released Tuesday. In his 20-page report, Auditor General Bill Monroe recommended that the seven-year contracts be at least partially renegotiated to ensure that the state gets its money's worth. State technology officials said they agreed with many of the audit's concerns. The state, in its largest privatization effort to date, has signed deals over the past two years to outsource services such as help-desk operations, e-mail support, data storage and management of a multitude of government Web sites to two large high-tech firms. State Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell, D-Fort Lauderdale, called the audit "another sure sign" that state government is entering into privatization contracts carelessly. "Without better safeguards, we're going to have a great deal of situations like this where corporations are going to make money and our tax dollars are being wasted," Campbell said. "I have a funny feeling that a lot of money is going into the corporate profits as opposed to Floridians' savings." The audit determined that State Technology Office administrators failed to provide even basic justification for why they were outsourcing the work, and it criticized the office for failing to ensure that a lucrative project wasn't steered to certain vendors. One of the vendors, BearingPoint of McLean, Va., has been mentioned in connection to a separate government probe of contract concerns at the state Department of Children & Families. The other vendor, Accenture, a New York-based conglomerate, was involved in creating a database of "potential felons" that was so flawed that Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Glenda Hood were forced earlier this month to scrap the list. BearingPoint's Tallahassee lobbyist, Don Yeager, has been both a campaign contributor and political adviser to Senate President Jim King, R-Jacksonville, and various other Republican state officials. Accenture, similarly, has hired a team of formerly high-ranking Republican officials with close ties to Gov. Jeb Bush to lobby for business with the state. orlandosentinel.com You'd think that maybe Jeb would be a little careful about stuff like that this time around. You'd think wrong, apparently. Maybe he figured with Scalia covering his back, it didn't much matter. This is all quite off topic, but then, I don't actually see where much is on topic around here these days.