Author: mopress

By Greg Moses

OffTheKuff

“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” used to be a simple test for figuring out whether there ought to be a law. In the case of laws to require photo ID for voting, there is nothing broken and nothing that needs fixing. So why, in state after state, are Republicans fixing things that don’t need fixing while ignoring so many other things that do?

“You have to show ID to rent a video at Blockbuster,” said Texas sponsor of the photo ID bill Mary Denny to the AP. “That’s something simple and not nearly as sacred to us as casting our vote.”

Denny yesterday sounded just like a top Republican attorney from Atlanta last month who told the Texas Civil Rights Review that “photo IDs are required to rent movies.” Unless something different happens in Texas, this photo ID bill will pass on party-line votes just like it did in Georgia and in several other states where Republicans dominate the legislatures.

Republicans heading up these efforts do not claim that there is an ID problem among current voters. That’s not what’s broken. Rather, they say the problem is that voters are failing to behave like corporate customers and they say it like it’s a problem that needs fixing. They say it like we should be ashamed of ourselves for not behaving more like Blockbuster customers when it comes time to exercise our sacred right to vote.

Our best guess for why this is really happening? It is part of the Republican strategy to better manage the voting pool. As election analysts repeat time and again, the more voters in the pool there are, the more likely Democrats are to win, because try as they might, Democrats can’t shake the image of being the party most helpful to most people. So in the game of percentages, why wouldn’t the Republican Party want to keep the voting pool from growing?

And for Democrats who still think struggle is imperative, the game of percentages works exactly the other way. The more welcoming the voting process becomes, the more likely Democratic victory will be.

You might think that the Democratic calculation would get a groundswell of support from American citizens jealous to guard their inalienable rights to vote. You know, keep the government off our backs, and that kind of thing. But there are head games at play here that for some people make even the simple percentages very difficult to see.

In order to get inside the head game of this voter ID issue, first you have to put on your suit and climb into your Escalade. From this vantage point you can drive around from place to place, cutting across lanes, flashing your debit card, and showing off your drivers license in a world that not only makes way for you today, but which has a history of placing people like you right in the center of the history-making circle. In the portraits of USA presidents, you can kinda see yourself smiling back.

And this is the circle of experience that has always been at the center of voting in the USA. No Civil Rights struggle, no suffrage movement, no fifteenth or nineteenth amendment was required to constitutionalize their vote. The constitution has always been by, for, and about them. They can even go to Blockbuster and not get ripped off!

On the other hand, when I’m standing in line at my local video store (because I do not go to Blockbuster) none of the Escalade class are to be seen. When photo IDs are checked, the company is paying me no compliment, because the company simply wants to know where to find me later in case they want to collect some property or cash.

So how is this photo ID movement imposed by corporations upon working consumers supposed to serve as some kind of guide to the proper exercise of voting rights? I’m trying to think: what am I taking away from the voting booth that they might want to come and take back from me later?

Arguments about the photo ID movement tend to focus on existing voters. As with people driving Escalades, people who are already used to voting will probably not be much affected by the photo ID movement. But here it is crucial to remember that in America, most people are not used to voting. That’s right, democracy as we know it so far in America turns most people off and keeps most people away. This is the actual history of the matter even prior to the photo ID movement now underway.

Obviously, it should go without saying, new voters are not used to voting at all. And as we pointed out earlier, if Democrats are going to increase their chances of victory, they have to increase the likelihood that new voters will show up. But deeper than this, and something that even some Democrats don’t seem to get, if America wants to keep up a history of democracy then more and more people will have to feel encouraged to vote.

So in order to get inside the head game of this voter ID movement now we have to get out of our suit, our Escalade, and place ourselves in the position of someone marginal to the center, asking themselves, do they want to come in? What the photo ID movement says to these newcomers is that they first have something to prove.

It’s not enough that they live here, work here, and are subject to the acts of state that they live under. No, these things alone do not qualify them to voice their crucial opinion about the rulers who will reign above their heads. Because as the Escalade class is here to testify, American Democracy has never been about welcoming newcomers into THIS circle.

In the head game of voting rights, moderate Democrats offer the worst of trips. They are inside the circle and cannot suppose anymore what they must fight for in order to aggressively expand the circle for others. They think Democrats have already achieved a democracy worth fighting for. So they say things like, “I don’t see the problem with this” because basically for the moderate Democrat, living under Republican rule is good as the rest.

So we encourage the moderate Democrat to ask, how does the example of Blockbuster help to guide us in a matter so sacred as the human right to vote? If we are not capable of laughing out loud at the suggestion that Blockbuster should be our example of democracy then how far below the sacred have we sunk?

Actually it turns out, there’s something broke here that’s been broke for quite a while. But like the service manager at a dishonest car shop, Republicans are pointing to the wrong thing. What’s broke is that the desire to welcome new people into the American voting tent has once again been overcome by small minded suspicions about who they are and what they might do with their power amongst us. What’s broke is that we say we believe the revolutionary dream of American democracy, but we do not.

By Greg Moses

As the fifty states work toward a federally mandated deadline to centralize their voter registration databases by Jan. 1 we ask why has there been so little critical attention given to these historic projects? The answer begins with a quote from a 2002 report by electionline:

Political parties and campaigns are primary beneficiaries of statewide registration databases. Almost every state that produces a statewide list also sells that list.

If political managers are already lining up to purchase clean lists from the new databases, then we have a pretty good structural hypothesis to explain why these databases are really going up, and why there is so little evidence that usual political players have anything to say by way of criticism about these projects.

In Great Britain, political parties are building hi-tek databases after the example of Republican Party USA, merging private databanks to make voter lists with “credit history, consumer-lifestyle surveys and purchasing habits.”

The 2002 electionline review of statewide voter registration has an air of inevitability about it. Statewide registrations are justified in order to prevent some “qualified” voter from being turned away because of poorly kept records.

A sidebar in the electionline report indicates however that Civil Rights voices worry, because centralized voter rolls make questionable purges of “qualified” voters more likely. Greg Palast’s “story of the year” in 2000 reported on Florida’s contract cleansing of 173,000 names from that state’s voter rolls. In Ohio 28,000 voters were purged in Lucas County alone during the summer of 2004.

In the justification of centralized voter rolls, we have the classic ingredients of ideology, the explanation that inverts reality. Let’s centralize voter rolls to ensure that “qualified” voters are well kept says ideology. But centralized voter rolls actually increase the likelihood that “qualified” voters can be more powerfully purged.

The fear of losing your right to vote is played up by ideology in order to install a system that promises to allay that fear, while the actual results are more likely to see the fear fulfilled.

Behind every ideological inversion lies an interest, and as we see the interest in this case is widely held among parties and campaign consultants who as a class are masters of ideology in the first place. From a political management point of view, eliminating “deadwood” from voter rolls is equivalent to eliminating bad contacts from campaign expenses.

From this point of view, it is really too neat to note that a “retail man” with experience as a car dealer and power-fundraiser has become the “gonna get it done” guy for the Texas database. Although we should note in fairness to the whole man that all our research on the project has been facilitated by his office, at his office, and he never fails to shake a hand.

But returning to the main question, the logical path to a red-blooded American ideology always bypasses, sidelines, and side-bars Civil Rights experience.

Here is the complaint of a Civil Rights voice that appears in a sidebar of the electionline report:

Some experts argue that national efforts to create statewide voter registration databases would exacerbate problems like those that arose from
Florida’s 2000 purge. In particular, the purging process has raised concerns. “We, the voting public, must have some control over who can purge names from the statewide databases,” said Penda Hair of the Washington-based Advancement Project.

Failure to care very much about Civil Rights experience is one symptom of what Palast calls our “apartheid democracy, in which wealthy white votes almost always count, but minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not recorded.”

And this apartheid democracy is enabled by a special brand of racist ideology which conjures fear about “dirty” voter rolls the better to “clean” them for good. When the road to American suffrage is viewed from within Civil Rights experience, the ruts of these paths are clear and continuous. Where there are powerful ways for technology to be used in apartheid fashion, they will be.

One answer to the coming predicament is to enact safeguard provisions such as those contained in an election-reform bill sponsored by John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich) that would require states to produce federal reports of purged voters prior to elections. Purged voters should also receive notice by mail. And public notice should be required prior to any batch operation on a voter database. A process of public review should be put in place. If there is a federal mandate for centralized voter rolls, there should be federal safeguards.

Finally a note of pure philosophy: even the Conyers solution (which we support) falls short of Penda Hair’s call for voter control over voter lists. A self-managing electorate? Is that something Americans would dare to think about? In the presence of ideas like that, doesn’t ideology warn us to be very afraid?

* * *

electionline report: pdf format: march 2002

Live Connection with DPS Raises Question
As IBM Gets New Project Manager and State Frets Expectations

Ten Thousand Hours: Part Three
Weeks 14-21 of the Texas Voter Database Project

By Greg Moses

When Texas pays $4 million to license the eRegistry election management software from Hart InterCivic, will it be buying a product that the state has helped to develop? And when the voter management system is hooked up to live records from law enforcement, will the voters be running the state or will the state be running the voters? These questions we ask after going through facts found in project documents for the Texas voter database and election management project, weeks 14-21.

Weeks 14-21 continue to show evidence of intensive knowledge harvesting as developers of the proprietary eRegistry software place so many demands on the expertise of state employees that the employees register a complaint about their ability to keep up. And the contract assumption that Hart InterCivic actually has a COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) product to offer the state comes under question when the first release of the software arrives without installation instructions or a users manual.

These weeks also see a change in managers for Team IBM as weekly reports begin to display more detailed summaries of contractor activities.

And the running issue of what it means to privatize functions of public technology finds another prime case study when Hart InterCivic representatives express concern that their March 3 demonstration of software to a focus group of county election officials may result in “disclosures”. The same focus group also raises concerns for the state project manager that “county expectations” also need managing. By the end of the period the state manager is asking for administrative help so that he can be more free to discuss the project more frequently with “external stakeholders”.

As much of the technical activity for this period revolves around live data connections between the Secretary of State (SOS) and Department of Public Safety (DPS), we can also raise questions about a trend in voter management toward live interfaces with law enforcement. Is voter management now a subset of law enforcement? As update information is freely swapped between SOS and DPS, we wonder. Are the voters running the state or is the state running the voters?

Let’s try this answer. The high tech frontier in election management is creating a voting population as a class of administrative privilege that will be more and more pre-screened and qualified to vote. Against this trend a clear “human rights” response is needed: “let all the people vote, period.”

* * *

The IBM weekly status report for Feb. 5-11 has interesting features. For one thing, it is mislabeled week thirteen (it should be week fourteen) which serves as consolation against small-minded perfectionists everywhere who utter dicta about how things really work in the big time.

But more importantly, the document sets a new standard for this $12 million project to build a privatized voter database and election management system for Texas. It serves as documentary evidence that something has changed at the project, and although it bears the name of the initial project manager for Team IBM, the report’s style, format, and presentation hint that the new manager is already doing the old manager’s paperwork.

In the week-fourteen report we glimpse for the first time the full range of activities being conducted by at least ten project components: security team, data migration team, data mart team, voter information programmer, DBA, lead architect, interface team, GIS team, test team, and application team.

The security team for example puts together a meeting between staff from the Secretary of State (SOS) and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) where they work out the difficulties of making secure database connections between the voter registration system and DPS. As the reader may recall from previous articles in this series, the security team for the project will then take the knowledge gained from this meeting between state workers and turn it into a privatized computer solution that can be sold back to the state with service contracts attached.

The same kind of knowledge harvesting is going on with the project DBA (database administrator) who is meeting with “state employees and the data mart team to discuss reporting requirements.” In a handy term for wordplay, the DBA is working up “demoralized” tables that can be used by eRegistry software, a proprietary product of Hart InterCivic. Once the DBA gets clear about the data warehouse design, eRegistry will be “reverse engineered.” According to the contract with the state, “reverse engineering” of eRegistry is something that only Hart is allowed to do.

And this raises an interesting question for intellectual property buffs. If eRegistry is reverse engineered during a public contract with Texas to whom do the rights to the reverse engineered product belong? Is this another case where public money, public expertise, and public functions are all contributing to privatized value of a product in the marketplace? I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s an interesting question to ask.

Knowledge harvesting among state workers has created such “multiple and parallel demands on SOS resources” that state workers say they can hardly keep up with everything that Hart needs them to do. Meanwhile, the state is letting Team IBM use its screen reader to run tests with.

Also busy down at DPS is the interface team figuring out how to make the connections for live checks of drivers license and social security numbers, so that numbers placed on voter registration applications can be checked against the DPS database. Again, fresh questions come up for public inquiry. What all is attached to these numbers down at the DPS? What events can be triggered by the “live checks” that come in, other than a simple yes or no from DPS to SOS that a number does or does not belong to a name?

In addition to “live checks” of numbers, the interface team is also working on getting “signature images” from DPS that can be matched to signatures on voter registration cards. Remember you sign your drivers license, and that signature image is stored on a DPS computer. For some reason which is probably not very permanent, the DPS declines to offer up its signature images — I mean YOUR signature images — to the SOS.

By week fifteen it’s official, there is a new manager on board for Team IBM.

The state project manager during week sixteen reports that he has begun working with the new project manager for Team IBM who “is getting his arms around the project.” We don’t yet know what the new IBM manager had to say for weeks sixteen and seventeen (those reports were not included) but by week eighteen, the project plan is in version 84, and the list of project issues for Team IBM has grown in three weeks time from eight to 23.

Two of the new project issues in week 18 revolve around a 25-member county focus group that meets in Austin on March 3 (week 17). SOS has assembled the focus group in an effort to sell more counties on the project. But Hart registers “disclosure concerns” about all these folks seeing its eRegistry prototype, and the state project manager worries about “Counties Expectation Management.” Belonging to the focus group places public election officials in the dicey position of previewing plans for election management (a very public issue) and proprietary software (a very private property) at one and the same time. What does Hart fear they will talk about? What does the state project manager fear they have come to expect from this project? If we put the two worries together, may we infer that all did not go well on March 3?

March 3 turns out to be an unlucky day for another reason. Someone
from Team IBM copies the entire project folder and then “inadvertently” places the duplicate back onto the public workspace. For the next two weeks, updates to the project will be split between the two folders creating “confusion, lost comment documents, and process flow breakdown.” When the glitch is discovered about March 18, the state project manager will have to spend time bringing the two files back together.

Week 19 is a crucial week for the project. It is the deadline for Hart InterCivic to deliver its first COTS software, the Commercial Off-The-Shelf product that the state will eventually pay $4 million to use. On the due date for release of Hart One, the state receives a letter from Hart with a URL and password. On March 17, Hart presents a “walkthrough” of the software. But documentation was yet to be found. On the face of things, what Hart delivered does not yet look like a COTS.

Hart follow-up items appear in the report for week 20. The eRegistry configuration guide is reviewed on March 21. And on March 28, notice is received from the escrow service that deposits Hart software (actually this is a week 21 event).

During week 21 the external interface team meets with IBM and SOS to talk about tech submit issues and directory structure. External interfaces for the project have grown from an initial 10 to 19 since the project started. Does this mean that the number of databases hooked up to the election system has nearly doubled in scope?

According to plans contained in IBM reports, it looks like the week of April 18 will be eventful. There is a County Focus Group scheduled for April 19 to review the first Hart release of mid-March. On April 20 the SOS staff will be tasked to define their business rules in ways that are pertinent to the logic of eRegistry. And on April 22 Jeff Osborn will be in town.

Ten Thousand Hours of Privatization, Part Two
Weeks 10-13 of the Texas Voter Database Project

By Greg Moses

During weeks ten to thirteen (January 2005) of the Texas Voter Database Project we can see two significant transformations of the power matrix between the state and its private contractors. From one side, private contractors IBM and Hart InterCivic intensify their process of extracting from state employees their practical knowledge of election management, the better to privatize that knowledge into a commercial product.

From the other side, we see the state project manager imposing on Team IBM a meticulous process of plans and reports that discipline the private contractors into more transparent structures of information and accountability. The famous paperwork of state bureaucracy is force fed.

Also, in the process of writing up this report on the January activities, The Texas Civil Rights Review is beginning to feel the difference between reporting on state agencies and private companies.

For one thing, part of the reason that state agencies exist is to be involved in public accountability and criticism. We have logged a dozen hours this week viewing documents at the capitol. If the work resulting from docs supplied by the Secretary of State were to criticize the SOS, there might be consequences, but the game would be well known, and there would be no stock price to defend, no truly colossal sum of money at stake.

On the other hand, we notice that we do not spend any time at the headquarters of IBM or Hart InterCivic going through their documents. And if the results of our public research were to be perceived as critical of a global computer consulting firm, there might also be consequences, but the consequences would be of a different king (quite a nice typo I think). One effect of privatization therefore is to shift significant activities into realms where the games of public accountability and criticism meet new constraints, where also the consequences of debate are tossed into a context of stock prices and product sales. And when that happens, well, why do you think the business press is ever so cheery in comparison to the political press?

So if you are among the news consumers today who feel that even the political press has grown too cheery lately, perhaps that is just one more symptom of the shift we are all experiencing from a public to a privatized world order.

* * *

During the second week of January (week ten) the Colorado branch of Hart InterCivic invites a visit from two top-level administrators at the Elections Division of the SOS. It is difficult to imagine that Hart could do otherwise.

The makers of proprietary election equipment could hardly develop their wares with confidence if they did not know first what the public servants know about the practicalities of election management. The Colorado branch of Hart InterCivic first developed the eSlate voting system that we use in Travis County. Now they are developing a voter registration database, election management system, and jury wheel, all to be delivered to the state as a private product more technically known as COTS or Commercial Off-The-Shelf.

Although Hart is lead subcontractor for the project because of its ability to deliver an election management COTS, the product is not really ready for delivery yet. First, it has to be developed. As the visit to Colorado shows, the state is an active partner in helping Hart to develop the very same COTS that the state will license from Hart at a cost of $4 million, as soon as it is actually delivered.

In five years time the state will be able to buy back that COTS at “fair market value.” But first, as we say, the COTS must be developed and for this, forgive the repetition, public servants have to be invited to Colorado to meet with private contractors. And among those private contractors are private Subject Matter Experts who will later charge the state a hundred or two hundred bucks per hour to help solve any critical problems that might arise. Perhaps the reader is aware of famous economic principles of efficiency exemplified in this process. No doubt the principles are well known in business schools.

Also during week ten, Team IBM submits an invoice for $28,000 to cover its December work and a bill for $5,853 in travel and living expenses. A steering committee for the Secretary of State’s office (SOS) meets on Jan. 20.

During week eleven, billable hours are up to 4,230 and one more deliverable is delivered, but fifteen items “expected to be delivered” by Team IBM do not get delivered. We are beginning to understand why the state’s project manager would look back on this as a “poor start.”

Some of the early difficulties in getting started derive from the state’s failure to purchase equipment on schedule. The contract plan called for the state to purchase a million dollars in hardware and software (on top of the $12 million to contractors IBM and Hart InterCivic). But in a snafu officially known as Project Issue Number 001, it turns out the state couldn’t purchase computer equipment in such a straightforward way.

The problem with major computing tasks in Texas state government is that they are supposed to be consolidated into a San Angelo facility managed by Northrup Grumman. So the state project manager puts in a change order to move the project equipment to San Angelo as required by state law. It takes a couple of months to finally decide that the project will be kept in Austin as planned, but meanwhile Team IBM is having difficulty understanding the status of purchasing orders for hardware.

Back during week six the IBM project manager reported hearing from one person that the equipment had been ordered, while another person told her no, it had not. What she finds out during week seven is that the order cannot be placed for Austin equipment until the purchase is authorized by means of a special waiver from the Legislative Budget Board, since the hardware will not be placed in San Angelo.

Meanwhile, thanks to that meeting in Colorado, Team IBM reports that critical requirements have been collected for two crucial pieces of the election management puzzle: Election Night Reporting (ENR) and Ballot Definition (BD).

The Team IBM project manager is having troubles of her own keeping up with meticulous administrative details demanded by the state’s project manager. As she turns in a new, revised work plan that is “deliverable driven rather than task driven” she makes a formal complaint for the record. “Increased administrative tasks have caused deliverables and work papers to slide.” It is pleasing to see how she appropriates the new language of deliverables in order to articulate her complaint. She logs her complaint as Project Issue Number 002, assigns it a priority level ‘H’ for high, and places it on an Issues List to be either analyzed, brought up for decision, or resolved during future reporting periods. In fact, whether she knows it or not, her days as IBM project manager will soon end.

In the hardware/software area, a “development environment” has been set up where Team IBM can share project files with the state, but there is still no election system to test yet, because first of all the hardware hasn’t arrived, and second of all the VR (or voter registration software) is still in demo stage at Hart.

During week twelve, the Team IBM administrator uses a brand new status report format (version four) to say that she has helped to produce two new plan docs, two strategy docs, and “revised project work plan number 80.” And on Jan. 28, the project convenes a Focus Group of 32 people from 15 counties to share progress to date.

As January changes to February, ten more plans are delivered during week thirteen while intensive meetings continue in Colorado. As Team IBM also convenes meetings with the state IT staff to discuss ENR and BD ar
chitecture, Hart says that its Voter Registration build is 90 percent complete, awaiting crucial review by one state expert who happens to be not available at the moment. A third “project issue” is added: when will the scope of ENR and BD be defined?

And finally, in the state’s report for week thirteen, original completion dates are x-ed out and moved back. In week thirteen the project is officially behind schedule.

To be continued in series.