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Philadelphia pays $353,710 for website
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:05:35 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joehall () gmail com> Date: January 19, 2009 3:24:01 PM EST To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Philadelphia pays $353,710 for website You know you're in trouble when the invoice says, "This project must be paid prior to Tuesday 11/4/08 election or vendor threatens to limit Internet access to election results." best, Joe ---- http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20090116_Clout__High_price_for_free_access_to_vote_data.html Clout: High price for free access to vote data By Daily News Staff Philadelphia Daily NewsTHE CITY'S election machinery finally made it into the 21st century in November.
For the first time, the city posted unofficial election results on its Web site as the votes were counted on Election Night. Anyone with a computer and Internet access could go to the Web and get ward-by-ward returns for any candidate in Philadelphia. But it was an expensive trip to the Electronic Age. The city paid $353,710 for its Web setup, the money going to Danaher Controls, a firm that had already collected more than $24 million from the city since 2001, for building and servicing voting machines. Local activists who spurred the city to ease access to election results are shocked at how much it cost. "That's a mind-boggling number. It doesn't make any sense," said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, a Penn law student who protested last summer when he discovered that city political figures had been provided free Internet passwords to get election results that were unavailable to the general public. "It's an obscene amount of money for the job, a real robbery of the city," said Stephanie Singer, a recently elected Center City Democratic ward leader who handles electronic-data issues in her day job at a real-estate-management firm. "It doesn't pass the smell test," said a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Daniel Sleator. Danaher executives failed to answer repeated calls from the Daily News. The city had already paid Danaher for a system that downloaded data from voting-machine cartridges and provided running totals to a limited number of computer users with passwords. Media outlets paid hundreds of dollars for the passwords, while political figures got them for free. The new wrinkle was to eliminate the password requirement and provide the same running vote totals to anyone who visited the city's Web site. "It sounds like something one programmer could throw together in a week or two, that's my intuition," Sleator said. For $20,000, he said, "you can buy a server computer that will handle millions of requests" for the data. Allan R. Frank, the city's chief information officer, signed off on the expenditure. Frank told Clout he initially hoped the project could be handled as Sleator suggested. But Danaher had developed the initial software and the city had to rely on Danaher for a new application, Frank said. "I made some attempt to bargain," Frank said. "I wish it was cheaper, but they were the only game in town. . . . In their defense, they did the job asked in a short period of time. It worked. It didn't go down on Election Night." Danaher apparently realized it had the city over a barrel. A payment voucher moving through the city Finance Department warned: "This project must be paid prior to Tuesday 11/4/08 election or vendor threatens to limit Internet access to election results." Mayor Nutter's office focused on just one point: The project was funded with federal money, not from the city budget. "You couldn't use this money to save the libraries," said spokeswoman Maura Kennedy. -- Joseph Lorenzo Hall ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate UC Berkeley School of Information Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy http://josephhall.org/ ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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