In addition to the $13.9 million the state has agreed to pay Accenture, millions more are being spent on other aspects of the voter registration project – including at least $4.1 million to another private firm, Deloitte Consulting, for project management and $10.2 million for state Elections Board staff oversight, hardware and data entry – for a total cost of at least $28.2 million. In contrast, Minnesota relied on state employees to do its statewide voter list and completed the work at a cost of $5.3 million.
The outsourcing of voter registration in Wisconsin is the offspring of a political promise Governor Jim Doyle made to eliminate 10,000 state jobs, thereby reducing the size of the state workforce to 1986 levels. Fulfilling that campaign promise has prompted the state to outsource government services to private companies, even when the cost of outsourcing is considerably greater for taxpayers.
This is the same State Elections Board whose Executive Director, Kevin Kennedy, resorted to parroting Diebold talking points at a Winnebago County Board meeting designed to air concerns about touch screen voting machines. It's interesting how the SEB is now parroting Accenture talking points to sweep under the rug the database disaster; in the Journal Sentinel article we learn that the voter list expense and the delay are the result of Wisconsin being "complex."
1 comment:
You should ask those guys who voted for those machines if they got virus protection on their computers at home and if their office networks have firewalls and use e-mail encryption and then ask them if they get their girdles in a knot worrying about security when they order their big stretchy pants online. And if they do, you should tell them to turn all that stuff off, go completely naked on the net and and wear t-shirts with their s.s. numbers and bank accounts printed on them because apparently we live in a world where technological security is a non-issue.
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