Electionsofficial defends contract

A clerks' group disputes a claim that it wanted too much money to build Florida's voter database.

By CHRIS DAVIS and MATTHEW DOIG

chris.davis@heraldtribune.com
matthew.doig@heraldtribune.com

In an October 2001 meeting with lawmakers, Florida's top elections official said he had no choice but to hire a private company to build Florida's Central Voter Database.

The Florida Association of Court Clerks, a nonprofit organization that lawmakers wanted to handle the project, demanded too much money, he said.

But former elections chief Clay Roberts didn't tell lawmakers that the clerks association had agreed to do the job for exactly the price he wanted.

The omission gave Roberts and the Department of State a reason to hire a private company. They chose a contractor with ties to the Republican Party, going against a plan lawmakers thought would prevent a repeat of the 2000 election fiasco.

Now the state has been forced to scrap a key part of the project, after a Herald-Tribune investigation exposed a fatal flaw in it. The state is reviewing what went wrong, and the mistake has elections officials under fire again as the 2004 elections approach.

Roberts' decision in 2001 left the project in the hands of a company that would answer to the Department of State, rather than leaving it up to the court clerks.

Some say that's what the department wanted from the start authority over the voter database, which was also used to create the state's controversial felon purge list.

The Herald-Tribune investigation showed that the state's $2 million effort to cleanse the voter rolls of felons would have allowed thousands of Hispanic felons to vote in 2004. Secretary of State Glenda Hood killed the list earlier this month.

Tense negotiations

Flaws in the felon list are not new to Florida's elections officials.

After the 2000 election, state officials were hounded by accusations that they used a private company with Republican ties to purge mostly black Democrats from the voter rolls.

It was against that back that Roberts told state lawmakers he had ended negotiations with the clerks association to create the voter database for 2004.

He had hired Accenture, a $14 billion company whose lobbyists in Tallahassee have included a former state GOP chairman and a former top aide to Gov. Jeb Bush.

During an Oct. 11, 2001, meeting of the Senate Committee on Ethics and Elections, Roberts reported that contract talks broke down because the clerks association wanted several hundred thousand dollars a year more than the Legislature had agreed to pay.

They tried to negotiate the price in the summer of 2001.

In fact, Roger Alderman, executive director of the clerks association, e-mailed Roberts on July 13 and agreed to accept $525,000 a year, the exact cost set out by lawmakers. In the e-mail, recently obtained by the Herald-Tribune, Alderman also asked for a meeting a few days later "to attempt to reach resolution on the remaining few open issues."

Alderman said he never heard back from Roberts.

Roberts told the Herald-Tribune on Wednesday that the clerks reneged on the offer outlined in the e-mail when he called the clerks' attorney, Fred Baggett, to schedule a meeting.

According to Roberts, Baggett gave him an ultimatum: Agree to pay the higher price before they hung up the phone, or find someone else to do the project.

Roberts said he declined.

Baggett denies that any such conversation took place.

"That absolutely did not happen," said Baggett. "We kept waiting for them to get back to us."

If Baggett made such a call, Roberts didn't bring it up in October 2001, when the Senate elections committee quizzed him on what went wrong with the negotiations.

Several members of that committee raised concerns that the Department of State was moving in a direction that lawmakers wanted to avoid.

Fighting for control

Some officials involved in the negotiations believe that the Department of State always wanted to cut the clerks out so it could retain control of the voter database.

"Virtually from the beginning of negotiations, we knew a deal wouldn't get done," said former Sen. Daryl Jones, a Democrat from Miami who sat on the Senate elections committee during negotiations.

The top elections officials at the time, Roberts, and former Secretary of State Katherine Harris, said they fully intended to strike a deal with the clerks.

A spokesman for the Department of State refused to comment for this story, saying the agency has initiated an internal investigation into what went wrong with the felon purge list.

But Harris, now a member of the U.S. House, told the Herald-Tribune through a spokesman Tuesday that one of her top priorities in 2001 was keeping the database under state control to "guarantee Florida's taxpayers fully owned the system they paid for."

Democrats and civil rights organizations have called for federal and state investigations to determine if Hispanics, who tend to vote Republican, were intentionally left off the purge list. Meanwhile, nearly half of the 48,000 people on the purge list were blacks, who tend to vote for Democrats.

Such criticism is exactly what lawmakers hoped to avoid when they passed the 2001 election reform law.

Lawmakers were so concerned about hiring another private company that they wrote the clerks association into the state law that required the creation of a statewide voter database and a new attempt to purge felons.

"Our heart's desire was to have the clerks do it," said Sen. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, who was chairman of the Senate ethics and election committee when the law passed.

The association seemed a natural choice because it had done similar work in Florida with databases tracking deadbeat dads and traffic violators.

It had the added attraction of answering to elected officials, Florida's clerks of court.

"When the votes of citizens are concerned, we felt it was a lot better to put that in the hands of elected or appointed officials than with a private company," Jones said. "There was less likely to be collusion or exerted influence, and the trust factor was much higher."

When lawmakers raised similar concerns after the state hired Accenture in late 2001, Harris launched a public campaign accusing the clerks association of trying to "gouge Florida's taxpayers."

To explain why the clerks weren't hired, Harris also cited a second concern: The clerks association had insisted on ownership of the software used to create the database.

But in the July 2001 e-mail to Roberts, Alderman also agreed to joint ownership of the database. That arrangement is not unusual when government agencies hire a company to do similar projects.

Roberts and election committee members said they had no problem with joint ownership.

Even so, Harris used the clerks association's insistence on ownership in late 2001 to defend the hiring of Accenture.

"Had we accepted this demand, this private entity could have extorted escalating fees to operate that database by threatening to cut off Florida's access to it," Harris wrote in letters to several newspapers in late 2001.

Harris' spokesman, David Host, said Roberts never showed her the e-mail in which the association agreed to a reduced cost and joint ownership.

Simple mistakes

The state's decision to assume full control of the voter database may have played a role in the demise of this year's felon purge list. It was Roberts who ordered last-minute changes to the way the state matched voters to felons, a decision that doomed the list.

Roberts' changes required a person's race to match across databases, even though some Division of Elections officials knew the felon database didn't offer Hispanic as a race category. That guaranteed that most Hispanics would be excluded.

The mistake could have been easily identified if someone had reviewed the list of potential felons after the state created it. But Accenture, which led the state through the creation of the central database, was not allowed by law to generate the felon purge list.

In addition, the clerks had proposed hiring an outside auditor to scrutinize the felon list and the data used to create it.

That auditor would have reviewed the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's database of felons for accuracy and other potential problems that could lead to flaws in the felon list.

The audit would have driven up the cost of the project by about $300,000, but also may have caught the flaws that led to the lack of Hispanics on the list.

In 2001, Harris said the audit would be a waste of money to "study the width of columns and other formatting issues."

Roberts said he never approached lawmakers to ask if they were willing to pay more for such an audit, in part because the state was in the midst of sweeping budget cuts. He conceded Wednesday that that might have been a mistake.

"In retrospect, yeah I should have gone to get more," he said.

During the October 2001 Senate meeting, several members of the ethics and election committee questioned Roberts about his hesitance to pay the clerks association more money, especially if the money was used to make sure the felon list would be accurate.

Former Sen. Debby Sanderson, a Republican from Fort Lauderdale, told Roberts she was worried about how the Department of State was handling the project.

"I have a concern that this may virtually be wasted money," she said.

Roberts assured the committee that the felon list would be accurate, despite the fact that the clerks association wouldn't be involved.

"I hope I made the right decision here, and I think I made the right decision here," Roberts told the senators. "And we will have a database that is finished on time that works and does everything that everyone contemplates it's going to do."