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VotingNews™ Briefs
SERVE contractors give "It's Not Too Late to Stop SERVE" commentary their frequent and extended attention
VotingNews Brief #50:
accenture and avanade, builders of SERVE, flock to The Latest VotingNews site to take long looks at "It's Not Too Late to Stop SERVE"; ciber, its designated ITA, stops by as well
Los Angeles, California
January 3, 2004
By Marc Strassman
Voting Technology Reporter
The Latest VotingNews
The site-monitoring software in place on the Latest VotingNews site is not that sophisticated or powerful but it can tell us some things about the impact of yesterday's publication of "It's not too late to stop SERVE," an op-ed piece that calls for replacing SERVE with an aggressive program designed to deliver absentee paper ballots to military and other overseas voters, give them the time and space to fill them out, and make sure that they are delivered to the local precincts in a timely and secure manner.
Who Are These People?
To access this article, click here
Among today's visitors were accenture (5 visits), avanade (3 visits), and ciber (1 visit). Besides sharing a penchant for using a small initial letter in their corporate names, these three companies also have in common an intensely direct relationship with the SERVE project.
You can take a look at a list of SERVE-related visitors to The Latest VotingNews web site on Friday, January 2, 2004, by clicking here.
You'll see that there were five visits from accenture, three from avanade, and one from ciber. The ciber visitor and all five of the accenture visitors entered the site at the "It's Not Too Late to Stop SERVE" page, and so did one of the avanade visitors. Another avanade visitor went directly to the page containing an interview with Stanford University computer science professor David Dill, who strongly criticizes SERVE in that interview. "Opposition research" is what they call it in politics. "Know your enemy" is what they call it in war.
Read the same press release, "Accenture helps Department of Defense develop secure Internet registration and voting demonstration for 2004 election" as reproduced verbatim on the "Consultant News" web site by clicking here.
To read accenture's "case study" of SERVE, click here.
ciber is the ITA (Independent Testing Authority) designated by the Pentagon to test SERVE. You can read an article describing ciber's plans to test the "voting part" but not the "Internet part" of the SERVE remote Internet voting system by clicking here. You can visit their home page by clicking here.
avanade, from which three visitors came, doesn't discuss its SERVE connection on its own site, except through a link to two press releases from Hart InterCivic, another SERVE subcontractor. Read one press release by clicking here. Read another by clicking here for an article in the Austin Business Journal linked to from the avanade news/media page.
But who is avanade? Their home page identifies them as providers of "/systems.solutions.successs/from Accenture & Microsoft." It also advertises them as "The premier global technology integrator for Microsoft enterprise solutions."
Take a look at this press release, from Oasis Communications, a London-based marketing agency, which refers to avanade as "the joint venture technology company of Microsoft and Accenture." Just click here.
Don't forget that SERVE only works on personal computers running the Windows operating system. Windows' creator, Microsoft (part owner of SERVE subcontractor avanade and partner with SERVE general contractor accenture) is known for many accomplishments, but making the world's most secure software, as is evident in this article from CNNmoney, is not one of them.
It's good to know that the makers and testers of SERVE are keeping a close watch on those trying to keep a close watch on them. Or is it?