toledoblade.com --

The Lucas County Board of Elections will be forced to reverse course, abandoning pursuit of a lease contract with Diebold Election Systems to provide optical scan voting machines for the November election.

It must instead put the lease out to competitive bid.

Paula Hicks-Hudson, director of the elections board, said the county prosecutor's office - which acts as the elections board's legal counsel - notified her yesterday that because the cost of the lease is more than $15,000, it must be put out to bid. She said she was unaware of the requirement and failed to notify board members Monday, when they gave her direction to negotiate a lease with Diebold.

"We have never entered into a contract of this magnitude," during her two-year tenure at the elections board, she said. "I didn't consult counsel and counsel didn't call up.

"I don't think it's going to hurt our time line," she said.

The board directed Ms. Hicks-Hudson on Monday to seek a contract with Diebold to lease 386 optical scan machines for $310,000 for the Nov. 2 election. The cost of optical scan ballots would push the total cost of using the machines above $350,000, according to records on file with the elections board.

She said yesterday that the request for proposals will stipulate those terms. The request must be advertised for two weeks, she said. Board members had planned to finalize the contract July 12. Ms. Hicks-Hudson said she was hopeful that deadline could still be met.

The problem with the bid came to light yesterday, Ms. Hicks-Hudson said, when a representative from a Diebold competitor - Elections Systems and Software of Omaha - called her to complain that the firm wasn't given a fair chance to compete for the lease contract.

Bernadette Noe, board chairman, said she was not pleased.

"Where is the prosecutor on all of this? They are representing us. We have been talking about leasing for a very long time. Had a competitor not raised the issue with us today, we would have been far down a road that we shouldn't have gone down," she said.

"I'm not sure who missed what," Ms. Noe said. "There needs to be a closer working relationship between our director and the prosecutor. We've never been out to bid on these. This is new to us, but not new to county government. They are the experts."

The county has used Diebold machines in its last three elections. Ms. Noe said she is alarmed that the bidding process may force the county to lease from a new firm that uses equipment that would be unfamiliar to both voters and the elections staff, requiring an inordinate amount of training to prepare for the election.

"This got caught as part of the normal process that the board has in making sure they do the contracts the right way," said John Borell, an assistant county prosecutor. "In the normal course of events, these things happen.

"We catch a lot of things in reviewing contracts," he added.

Contact Fritz Wenzel at:
fritz@theblade.com
or 419-724-6134.

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