Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005 | 8:19 a.m.
CARSON CITY -- A $4.6 million project by Secretary of State Dean Heller to start a statewide voter registration system has turned sour.
Clerks and voter registrars from the 17 counties that now handle the elections said the system under development is unreliable, inaccurate and should be scrapped in the 2006 election.
In addition, a new computer system, plagued with a multitude of problems, will not meet the Jan. 1 deadline imposed by the federal government.
Larry Lomax, Clark County registrar of voters, wrote a letter on behalf of all local election officials to Heller, saying it would "be irresponsible on our part to switch to a system that would not allow us to carry out our statutory responsibilities."
Lomax, in the letter dated Nov. 30, said the proposed system "would severely diminish our ability to provide even basic election-related services to the residents of our counties."
Heller's office has been warned several times in past month of the problems, Lomax said.
"This just doesn't work. They have worked 12 months, and it keeps failing," Carson City Clerk Alan Glover said Monday.
Each county now handles voter registration and other election chores. The federal government required a statewide system to be completed by Jan. 1, 2004, but Heller received a waiver. In his plan announced July 17, Heller said the "statewide voter registration system is on target for completion by Jan. 1, 2006."
To design and install the statewide system, Heller contracted with Covansys, a national company that in its advertisement promises to "help you secure a fully HAVA- (Help America Vote Act) compliant system in operation statewide, well before the 2006 deadline."
Heller did not return telephone calls.
Chief Deputy Secretary of State Renee Parker said the office had discussed changing direction before Lomax wrote the letter. She said there was no time to design and test the system for the 2006 election.
She said Covansys has "missed a few deadlines," but it is possible the statewide system could be up and running by February or March.
Lomax said "the Covansys system cannot be relied upon to conduct candidate filing, to print a voter registration card, to process a petition, to conduct early voting, to conduct absentee voting, to assign, track and pay poll workers and much, much more.
"The ability to run a report on any subject has yet to be developed and tested, and the clerks could not, as the statutes require, provide the major parties with the number of registered voters in each precinct as of Jan. 1, 2006.
"In responding to phone calls our departments receive every day, election workers could no longer provide directions to a voter's polling place, provide voters the names of the elected officials who represent them, or tell voters in what contests they are eligible to vote."
Access to more than 1 million documents scanned into the current Clark County system would be lost because the identifying batch numbers are not accessible in the Covansys system, Lomax said.
"Moreover, as a covered jurisdiction required to conduct bilingual elections, Clark County would lose its ability to track the population of Hispanic voters in the county's precincts, as required by the Justice Department," Lomax said.
"The (Covansys) system remains unacceptably burdensome to navigate and operate," Lomax said. "Tests in Clark County indicate that for many of the most frequently required tasks, the time required to enter or extract data is more than doubled, thereby significantly increasing staffing requirements in a busy election."
The clerks or voter registrars in the 17 counties have spent thousands of hours working with the Covansys system and are familiar with the current status, he said.
"That is why it is imperative we emphasize we cannot rely on the Covansys system to carry out the registration, petition and election-related activities that will be required to support the 2006 gubernatorial elections."
The clerks have "repeatedly attempted to alert the secretary of state's office" in the last several months "that the Covansys system was not progressing satisfactorily," Lomax said.
Heller should switch to a system in which the counties send their information to the state to comply with the federal deadline, Lomax added.
Parker said the office has decided to do that and allow Covansys to continue work toward the statewide system. She said the state can go to the Justice Department by Jan. 1 to certify the system for the 2006 election.
Lomax said this was "the only realistic solution."
Cy Ryan may be reached at (775) 687 5032 or at [email protected]
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