Arthur Andersen bites again

I'm waiting for the howls from the right side of the Cheddarsphere over this one, since they get all het up about anything related to good voting hygiene in Wisconsin. Sadly, my tours have turned up only silence. The problem? The contractor(s) hired by the state to organize our master voter list under federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) guidelines is working on blowing it for us:

Testing for Wisconsin's statewide voter database is behind schedule, prompting critics to warn that the state may miss a Jan. 1. deadline and lose federal aid. [. . .]

The cost for the work is also going up. In July, the board agreed to pay $1.5 million more to Deloitte Consulting to oversee the project, pushing the state's costs to about $27.5 million.

Of that, $13.9 million will go to Accenture to build the database and $4.2 million will go to Deloitte to manage the Accenture contract and overall project. The rest of the money is for state costs, such as salaries. [. . .]

Critics have long predicted the job would go over its budget and would not finish on time. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison) said testing delays show the list may not be done by Jan. 1.

The federal government is paying for the bulk of the project, but could pull some or all of its funds if the state misses the deadline. Because the contractors are aware of that, they will have an incentive to hike prices as the year goes on, Pocan said.

Among those critics? Me. I predicted more than three months ago that this would get worse before it got better. "You want to talk about a mess turning into a disaster?" I asked. "This will be it." And it is.

Why does the title of my post refer to Andersen Consulting, though? Because, you know, Andersen is that firm that audited all of Enron's cooked books and gave them passing marks. Andersen is culpable for all of the ills that Enron brought on the world. After the spate of justifiably bad publicity it attracted from that whole Enron mess, Andersen changed its name. To Accenture. That's right, boys and girls, Enron's accountants are doing Wisonsin's voter list and they are over budget and behind schedule. Let us remember--all of this happened because a single, unelected official was allowed direct millions of dollars to an Enron-accounting, off-shore tax-evading, under-FEC-investigation, Apartheid-supporting, Wisconsin-ripping-off company.

So . . . it's quite possible that next fall we'll have no voter fraud because, you know, we'll have no voting at all!

[Updated for correct spelling. D'oh!]