e-lection fallout
As the search for the guilty began after the election count fiasco, a series of questions pressed to the fore. Was the combined system assembled by Prokom and Łód-based Pixel Technology up to standard to begin with? Why was everything rushed into place over such a compressed period, in the course of two months leading up to the elections? And why was there no fully transparent public tender allowing the selection to be made among competing technologies and companies, including foreign competitors?
The only fact that is clear about the tender situation is that Prokom, together with Pixel, was selected by IT director Andrzej Florczyk at the National Elections Office from a shortlist of one. Florczyk has a number of explanations for this. One is that there was no time to publish a formal tender, under the auspices of the Public Procurement Act, because this meant he would have a financial obligation towards the winner - "and I cannot do it before I have the money."
He added: "I cannot publish the tender before the date of the election is announced, so I have only two months and it is too short a time to organise a tender procedure and prepare the system so that it works during elections."
Anita Winiak, spokeswoman at the Public Procurement Office quoted "special circumstances" where a tender was not necessary, and one of them was lack of money.
"So we can say everything is all right," she said.
But public procurement lawyer Katarzyna Dulewicz at law firm CMS Cameron McKenna is not so sure. Her reading of the public procurement act is that tender procedures may be legally avoided if the commissioned work is strictly necessary for reasons of extreme urgency or because of events which were unforeseeable to the commissioning authority, in this case the national elections office.
She did not consider that the local elections could rate as unforeseen, since they occur at precise cycles.
"They cannot say that the events were unforeseeable," she said, as the money for the elections had been agreed in the state budget a year previously. "I can't find a basis in the law for this. It's just another justification for what happend."
In last week's Business Journal, Florczyk, talking about the new technology to modernise the electoral process, explained comprehensively how work on the project had continued over the previous 12 years and would require deployment of the new system in all 2,900 regional electoral committees, the first time this had been done.
"Those polling stations that are going to be equipped with computers with the Internet access and the system will count the votes annually, but they will not have to write the report," he said. "All they have to do is enter data in that system and then send it to the regional electoral committees."
As things began to go wrong shortly after the polls closed, Prokom issued a statement declaring it was not the "executor of the entire IT system", but was only briefed to prepare the central programmes and database for the election office. The system performed badly because of the systems supposed to transmit voting data from the regional election committees to KBW headquarters.
The modular transmission part of the project was designed by Pixel, but no one was available for comment. Key executives switched off their phones and the company's main number was constantly engaged. But before the storm broke, Tomasz Szeler, a partner in the firm, told the Business Journal that his software was based on Prokom's technologies.
The election office's line hardened during the week, as it joined Prokom in pointing the finger at Pixel. Florczyk said: "It is a fact the two systems do not co-operate properly. The transmission module by Pixel does not co-operate properly with the central system by Prokom. There is some error or fault of Pixel's application, which interferes with both systems."
IT insiders were not convinced and questioned whether the fault really lay with the design of the entire system, in that it was not capable of handling such a huge mass of information. Meanwhile, another elections office spokesman, Stanisław Zabłocki, appeared to contradict other statements from KBW when he said that a third IT company, Infovide, had audited both systems and found they functioned well, both separately and jointly. The Business Journal tried to speak with communications director Justyna Forystek at Infovide but she was unavailable.
Scrutiny also fell on the level of preparation and training to implement the system. Florczyk admitted it had not indeed been tried out on a national scale.
"The time I had to organise all those elections was only two months; thus I had to drop out the idea of a general rehearsal if we wanted to be ready for election day on time," he said. "Now I see this was a mistake on my side for not trying the system out, and I guess I'll now have to pay for this."
Piotr Mondalski, a vice president of Prokom, told the Business Journal that the applications prepared to meet this year's requirements were expressed by KBW and agreed to in the contract. The written application was based on P4GL technology which had been verified during 10 years of experience.
"Malfunctioning of this application is due to the wrong design, not the tool used for it," he said. "It's like someone blaming Word for the user making errors while writing an essay."
Mondalski said IT professionals were being deployed around the country, either helping in inserting data into the system or enhancing the capability of the entire system. All the problems would be solved before the second round of the elections on November 11, he added.
The only fact that is clear about the tender situation is that Prokom, together with Pixel, was selected by IT director Andrzej Florczyk at the National Elections Office from a shortlist of one. Florczyk has a number of explanations for this. One is that there was no time to publish a formal tender, under the auspices of the Public Procurement Act, because this meant he would have a financial obligation towards the winner - "and I cannot do it before I have the money."
He added: "I cannot publish the tender before the date of the election is announced, so I have only two months and it is too short a time to organise a tender procedure and prepare the system so that it works during elections."
Anita Winiak, spokeswoman at the Public Procurement Office quoted "special circumstances" where a tender was not necessary, and one of them was lack of money.
"So we can say everything is all right," she said.
But public procurement lawyer Katarzyna Dulewicz at law firm CMS Cameron McKenna is not so sure. Her reading of the public procurement act is that tender procedures may be legally avoided if the commissioned work is strictly necessary for reasons of extreme urgency or because of events which were unforeseeable to the commissioning authority, in this case the national elections office.
She did not consider that the local elections could rate as unforeseen, since they occur at precise cycles.
"They cannot say that the events were unforeseeable," she said, as the money for the elections had been agreed in the state budget a year previously. "I can't find a basis in the law for this. It's just another justification for what happend."
In last week's Business Journal, Florczyk, talking about the new technology to modernise the electoral process, explained comprehensively how work on the project had continued over the previous 12 years and would require deployment of the new system in all 2,900 regional electoral committees, the first time this had been done.
"Those polling stations that are going to be equipped with computers with the Internet access and the system will count the votes annually, but they will not have to write the report," he said. "All they have to do is enter data in that system and then send it to the regional electoral committees."
As things began to go wrong shortly after the polls closed, Prokom issued a statement declaring it was not the "executor of the entire IT system", but was only briefed to prepare the central programmes and database for the election office. The system performed badly because of the systems supposed to transmit voting data from the regional election committees to KBW headquarters.
The modular transmission part of the project was designed by Pixel, but no one was available for comment. Key executives switched off their phones and the company's main number was constantly engaged. But before the storm broke, Tomasz Szeler, a partner in the firm, told the Business Journal that his software was based on Prokom's technologies.
The election office's line hardened during the week, as it joined Prokom in pointing the finger at Pixel. Florczyk said: "It is a fact the two systems do not co-operate properly. The transmission module by Pixel does not co-operate properly with the central system by Prokom. There is some error or fault of Pixel's application, which interferes with both systems."
IT insiders were not convinced and questioned whether the fault really lay with the design of the entire system, in that it was not capable of handling such a huge mass of information. Meanwhile, another elections office spokesman, Stanisław Zabłocki, appeared to contradict other statements from KBW when he said that a third IT company, Infovide, had audited both systems and found they functioned well, both separately and jointly. The Business Journal tried to speak with communications director Justyna Forystek at Infovide but she was unavailable.
Scrutiny also fell on the level of preparation and training to implement the system. Florczyk admitted it had not indeed been tried out on a national scale.
"The time I had to organise all those elections was only two months; thus I had to drop out the idea of a general rehearsal if we wanted to be ready for election day on time," he said. "Now I see this was a mistake on my side for not trying the system out, and I guess I'll now have to pay for this."
Piotr Mondalski, a vice president of Prokom, told the Business Journal that the applications prepared to meet this year's requirements were expressed by KBW and agreed to in the contract. The written application was based on P4GL technology which had been verified during 10 years of experience.
"Malfunctioning of this application is due to the wrong design, not the tool used for it," he said. "It's like someone blaming Word for the user making errors while writing an essay."
Mondalski said IT professionals were being deployed around the country, either helping in inserting data into the system or enhancing the capability of the entire system. All the problems would be solved before the second round of the elections on November 11, he added.
