Philadelphia pays $353,710 for website

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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 News

THE 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/




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