Two firms refuse to bid

Five companies vie on voting machines

By MARSHA SHULER
mshuler@theadvocate.com
Capitol news bureau

Two of seven companies bowed out of competition for a $47 million state voting machine contract, with one of them alleging the specifications for the project favor a particular vendor.

Hart InterCivic filed the complaint with state purchasing officials rather than respond to what is called a "request for proposals." Another company, Populex, also chose not to make a bid.

Meanwhile, a review team will begin assessing proposals from the five other firms. Contract award is scheduled for early July.

In the competition are Accupoll, Advanced Voting Systems, Diebold, Election Systems and Software and Sequoia Voting Systems.

The Hart submittal is the latest in a series of complaints that have dogged the voting machine ion process. Originally, some major voting machine companies were excluded from bidding.

The deadline for submitting proposal was Wednesday.

The state must replace about 5,000 lever-style voting machines that do not meet federal standards by the time federal elections roll around in 2006. The federal government is paying for the machine purchases.

Hart claims the "request for proposal" puts companies that offer touch-screen voting machines such as itself at a disadvantage and gives the edge to one company.

"We have concluded that the solicitation is prejudiced towards a full-face electronic voting system and provides a disproportionate advantage to a particular vendor. Thus, we do not believe Hart will receive an impartial evaluation," Hart sales and marketing vice president Phillip Braithwaite wrote.

Sequoia is the firm that offers a full-face electronic voting system that displays the total ballot for voter viewing at once. Touch-screen systems generally require scrolling from page to page.

On Friday, Braithwaite said his company hopes the request for proposal would be reissued "to allow a bid from our company to be more objectively considered."

Braithwaite said the company has not yet decided what step to take beyond the complaint filed with the Office of State Purchasing to which the proposals were submitted.

State purchasing director Denise Lea said the complaint is under consideration.

A key complaint concerns the number of machines that will be required to be provided. The proposal requires double the number of touch-screen machines to be provided.

The required bid ratio of 400 registered voters per full-face voting machine and 200 registered voters per touch-screen "is an arbitrarily disparate requirement lacking sufficient statistical support to be considered fair or reasonable," Braithwaite wrote.

Braithwaite said the state would not adjust that requirement in pre-solicitation meetings even when they were challenged by "virtually every vendor."

Elections chief Angie LaPlace said her office stands by the requirements contained in the request for proposal.

LaPlace said the requirement was based on a study of what other states are doing and estimates that vendors provided that ranged from 150 to 250 voters per machine. She also pointed to a test of the two different types of machines conducted in St. Tammany Parish.

"On average it takes about two-to-one touch-screen versus full-face," she said