With the emergence of Tom Salmon Jr. of Rockingham to take on Randy Brock for the State Auditor’s position, Democrats are giving notice that the days of letting state offices go unchallenged are long over. Despite Vermonters’ unparalleled record of re-electing incumbents, you’ve gotta like the Dems odds here, assuming Salmon turns out to be a half-decent campaigner.

On the other side of the aisle, however, Republicans, in a steady and coordinated way, have been working to make a case against Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, who has all but become an institution since her election.

Click on the link for the details…

Starting back in October, Randy Brock fired the GOP thesis salvo under the auspices of the State of Vermont. The point of attack was the development of the Statewide Voter Checklist mandated by the “Help America Vote Act” (HAVA) passed in the aftermath of the Florida election disaster of 2000. To combat fraud, one of the reforms was the mandated implementation of a single, centrally administrated Voter File into which all the local Town Clerks would update and maintain their town’s voter rolls. For Vermont, this is quite a sweeping change, as there was a complete lack of uniformity and a total grab bag of technological infrastructure and savvy across Vermont’s municipal offices.

Brock let the GOP cannons fly:

Vermont’s new statewide voter checklist lacks written plans, system documentation and performance standards, and has other problems, state Auditor Randy Brock said in a report made public Thursday. 

“A system so critical to the functioning of our voter registration process warrants the use of a disciplined and robust systems development process, without which the state runs the risk that the system will not work as intended or in a secure manner,” Brock said.

Markowitz was quick to defend herself with the common-sense assertion that, well, the statewide checklist wasn’t done yet. Sen Jim Condos (D-Chittenden), seeing the writing on the wall, was one of the Dems who spoke in her defense, before the report was even released, saying:

“To audit a checklist that isn’t complete yet boggles my mind,” said Sen. James Condos, D-Chittenden, chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee. “The auditor campaigned on the need for a nonpolitical auditor. This appears to be a fishing expedition and one might be lead to the question of whether this has politics behind it.”

Still, the issue is not necessarily so easy to dismiss. The right-wing Cool Blue Blog opined:

Requirements are meant to specify not only how the system works under normal, fault free conditions, but most importantly how it will work under failure conditions. And for a system like this, Security requirements will be absolutely critical.

I mean who hasn’t heard of ISO 9000 and ISO 9001? It has, for better or for worse, become an international standard for Quality. And what do they require?

Have a written process and follow it.

…and truth to tell, he’s generally correct. Building an Enterprise-level application isn’t like building a sundeck, it’s more like building a house. It’s a far more modular endeavor. In a house, for example, it’s appropriate to review the design before completion, as well as examine the individual working parts before during and after the overall project is set for habitation. Plumbing, heat, electricity, roofing — these are all independent components that should be reviewed as discrete components, as well as within the broader context.

So, do the Republicans have a technical point?

Maybe.

Do they have a political point?

Nah.

Seriously, this thing will have no legs. One of the reasons we heard so much about the seemingly unrelated issue of Same-Day Voter Registration, and whether or not it should become law during the last Town Meeting Day, was that the combination would have put the maximum strain possible on the new system during what was essentially its maiden voyage. And make no mistake, there is genuine reason to pay close attention to the functionality of this system. It was built using in-house staff. If it was built on the in-house technology used for other such SOS systems, it’s not inconceivable that the thing could buckle under the stress of 250 concurrent live instances. And don’t think this is far from the GOP’s collective mind. Political operative and current Secretary of Civil and Military Affairs Neale Lunderville was a SQL Server guru in his pre-Vermont-political life.

So maybe there’s a problem and maybe not, but as things stand — we’ll never know until after everyone has voted in November.

Presumably if the GOP had thrown the dice and gotten their system crash, they likely would have run on more than an incompetence argument. HAVA provided Vermont with several million dollars, a good chuck of which was set-aside for the statewide checklist. Given that the li’l Green Mountain State has but a paltry 400k-plus-change registered voters, a comprehensive database would hardly be a challenge. Technically speaking, you could probably pay thirty bucks for server space with a password-protected MySQL database that could easily handle the data and traffic from any one of a hundred web hosting outfits (although such a stategy wouldnt meet HAVA’s strict security requirements).

This means that they would have tried to turn it into a scandal about a waste of taxpayers money, and would have built a high-profile media campaign around it to knock Markowitz down the same way they took out Liz Ready. Critical to this would have been publicizing the frustration and anger of the notoriously prickly Town Clerks.

So given that Deb dodged the bullet, where is this strategy now?

In the doghouse, basically.

First of all, without a smoking server, the whole issue is an abstraction at best. Sure there are isolated reports of troubles with the database, but it doesn’t sound like anything of any tangible or political consequence at this point. And trying to extrapolate such an abstraction into a financial issue that will resonate with voters will be next to impossible.

Second of all, the Town Clerks love Markowitz. Despite their pronounced distaste for the Same-Day Voting issue, they rightfully credit Deb with transforming the traditionally combative relationship between the SOS and municipal offices into a true partnership. They are not likely to turn on her.

So at the end of the day, the GOP will spend a lot of time and energy for a big ol’ goose egg. Who they’ll spend that energy on behalf of is an open question. Former GOP Caucus Leader Connie Houston is a name I’ve heard floated about (and hey, ya gotta wonder if ex-dba Lunderville isn’t dying for a shot at her like his buddy Bertrand had…no, no, I haven’t heard anything in that department, but this is a blog dammit, I get to impusively and randomly speculate if I want to…)