Mr. Steve Bennett, CEO,
Mr. Scott Cook, Founder,
Mr. Bill Cambell, Chairman
Intuit, Inc.
2632 Marine Way
Mountain View, CA 94043

Gentleman:

I have been a user of Intuit products for almost ten years. I currently run my small business on Quickbooks 2007 and 2007 Payroll, and several businesses and enterprises which I have helped start also use Quickbooks – on my recommendation.

I’m about to start researching alternatives, for my business and others.

As a California resident, I was irritated by your successful efforts to kill the “Ready Return” program, in which the state Franchise Tax Board provided tools to allow simple filers to calculate and pay their own taxes – because it competed with your TurboTax products.

Here’s law professor Larry Lessig on your efforts:

In 2005, the state of California conducted an experiment. Hoping to make paying taxes easier, it launched a pilot program for people who were likely to file “simple returns.” The state already had the payroll information some taxpayers needed to file their returns, so it filled out 50,000 of those forms for them. Way in advance of the filing deadline, the state mailed the taxpayers their completed ReadyReturns. Like a Visa statement, the ReadyReturn itemized the taxes due, making the process easier for the taxpayer and more accurate for the government. People could either file the ReadyReturn or use the information to fill out forms on their own. Of taxpayers who hadn’t yet filed, 30 percent used the return; more than 95 percent of that group said they would do so again. Praise for the program was generally over-the-top.

Soon after ReadyReturn was launched, lobbyists from the tax-preparation industry began to pressure California lawmakers to abandon the innovation. Their opposition was not surprising: If figuring out your taxes were easy, why would anyone bother to hire H&R Block? If the government sends you a completed form, why buy TurboTax?

But what is surprising is that their “arguments” are having an effect. In February, the California Republican caucus released a report highlighting its “concerns” about the program – for example, that an effort to make taxes more efficient “violates the proper role of government.” Soon thereafter, a Republican state senator introduced a bill to stop the ReadyReturn program.

Inefficiency has become a virtue in government – and not just in California. Last year, the US Senate passed a funding bill with an amendment prohibiting the IRS from developing its own “income tax electronic filing or preparation products or services.”

Your efforts were successful:

Intuit lobbied hard to kill the free state program. It introduced “do no math” legislation to stop the free state software from performing calculations, thus rendering the program useless for taxpayers. It lobbied successfully this year to strip the Board of Equalization of funding to keep the free tax filing program alive.

While that was irritating, I’m deeply offended by your recent actions. In Tuesday’s election, State Controller candidate John Chiang has supported reinstituting the program. Your response? To donate a million dollars to an independent expenditure campaign for his opponent, Tony Strickland.

I can’t think of a more breathtaking effort to buy a favorable regulatory environment, or one that so consciously admits that your arguments wouldn’t succeed on their merits. Here’s Lessig again:

Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would end up calling private services first. And what if private schools pushed to reduce public school money so more families would flee the public system? Or what if taxicab companies managed to get a rail line placed just far enough from an airport to make public transportation prohibitively inconvenient? Pick your favorite of these outrages, and take note of how it makes you feel. You’ll experience it again when you read the next story – and this one, unfortunately, is true.

Count me a deeply offended customer, and one offended enough that I may not remain a customer. I’ll alert the readers of my blog when I finish researching alternatives and make the change.

Thanks for making such a good product; I’m sorry that you don’t trust the abilities of your team to build products good enough to win an audience without shaping the market in your favor.

Marc Danziger

You can tell them what you think of their efforts by clicking here.

I’m not making any more predictions this election – things are just too turbulent and unsettled (OK, I’ll make one. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be re-elected. And the Iowa Electronic Markets, which I follow pretty closely, are showing some definite trends…).

But I’ll make one absolute prediction about what we’ll be doing a week from today – as we wake up to the election results. We’ll be fighting about them.

This is going to be one of the ugliest elections in post WWII America; we will approach Third-World levels of distrust in the process. And that needs to be fixed.I’ve lived most of my adult life in California, which has a history of relatively clean elections (except for San Francisco, back in the 50’s), and so I’ve missed much of the cynicism that many of my peers who grew up in places like Chicago and Cleveland may have.

But the level of concern and scrutiny around voting are higher than ever. As I’ve said, that’s a not necessarily really bad thing, if it leads us to better processes and more transparency. Refs in football and baseball and line judges in tennis blew calls before instant replay; in the modern era of television and computerized scrutiny, I’ll say that the quality of refereeing in major sports has gone up because we can replay the serve or the tag at home and see whether the ref erred. Transparency and auditability count.

But there was an ugly period – when television was exposing the shortcomings of human refs and before the management of the game had taken these tools into account – when trust in the refs started to collapse.

We’re there now when it comes to voting. Part of it is the increasing sophistication of the electoral “mechanics” all high-level candidates employ. Part of it is the fact that those mechanics now do their work in plain daylight, in courtrooms, and in the media.

But we see the vulnerabilities of the system, and those vulnerabilities make us less and less certain of the outcomes, and more and more concerned that some dark conspiracy – of ACORN activists or Diebold fat cats – is deciding the outcome. And so, at the end of the day, he’s not your President.

The problem, of course, is that we have to live as though he is – whoever he is – for our polity to work. When I quoted Schaar a long time ago (and then in comments recently), the key graf for me is this one:

Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic.
(from “On Patriotism”, by John Schaar)

That political idea at the center of our covenant is that the government is responsible to the people through the vote. When that belief is tarnished too badly, the covenant sickens and may die.

Right now, that political idea is under a lot of challenge:

Fortune:

First get into a business you don’t understand, selling to customers who barely understand it either. Then roll out your product without adequate testing. Don’t hire enough skilled people. When people notice problems, deny, obfuscate and ignore. Finally, blame your critics when it all blows up in your face.

With missteps like those, it would be hard to succeed in the gumball business. But when your product is the hardware and software of democracy itself, that kind of performance gets you called not just incompetent but evil – an enemy of democracy. And that is what has happened to Diebold Inc. (Charts) of Canton, Ohio, since it got into the elections business in 2001.

Time magazine:

County election officials who spoke to TIME reported that most of the fears they field about the new machines come from Democrats, who have not won a national election in three cycles. It may be that a solid Democratic win in 2006 will allay some of their worries. It follows, of course, that if the Republicans lose, they will take up the charge. In fact, that’s already happening in some places this year.

USA Today:

The fall elections shape up as the most technologically perilous since 2000, election officials say, because 30% of the nation’s voting jurisdictions will be using new equipment. They include large parts of Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, scenes of key Senate races. “If you’re ever going to have a problem, it’s going to be that first election,” says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services.

We focus on the machines, because they are visible, and obviously problematic.

But voting is a system; you register, are enrolled, vote, have your vote counted, have your vote recounted, etc.

There is the potential for massive problems at virtually every step in the process.

We’re mishandling the new-tech voting machines and making them incredibly vulnerable – not only the overnights that we did in the CD-50 special election, but in today’s news from Tennessee…

Political insiders have expressed alarm after 12 voter smartcards have gone missing from one Shelby County, TN early vote location!

The cards are used to activate electronic voting machines.

The location at the center of the controversy is Bishop Byrne High School on E. Shelby Drive in Memphis.

The polling place started out with 25 cards. By Wednesday, 11 were missing, says an eyewitness.

But we also have problems with the old-fashioned paper systems as well. From the Joint Task Force on Election Fraud (the Milwaukee Police Department, Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the United States Attorney’s Office):

D. Vote Total Discrepancy
An additional finding of the task force to date is that the number of votes cast far exceeds the total number of recorded voters. The day after the November 2, 2004 election, the City of Milwaukee reported the total number of votes as 277,344. In late November an additional 191 previously uncounted absentee ballots were added, for a total of 277,535 votes cast. Still later, an additional 30 ballots were added, bringing the total number of counted votes to 277,565. City records, however, have been unable to match this total to a similar number of names of voters who cast ballots – either at the polls (under a prior registration or same day registration) or cast absentee ballots. At
present, the records show a total of 272,956 voter names – for a discrepancy of 4,609.

FYI – Kerry won in Wisconsin – 1,489,504 votes to 1,478,120 for a margin of 11,384.

That’s because we don’t want a strong ID policy at the registration level, because over 1/3 of us vote absentee with few checks and controls, because the systems (the combination of human and machine processes) that count votes are not robust – and because we want results 30 minutes after the polls close.

Up to now, we’ve been able – like the sports fans back in the 1950’s – to rely on the basic integrity of election officials to keep the level of error and fraud to an ‘acceptable’ level. But the television cameras are on, and we can all see that the baserunner was really safe.

So what’s needed is an overhaul of the system itself.

What’s needed is a careful examination of the process – from registration to recount – and a commitment to fix it by making it reliable, transparent, and reviewable. There will be limits to what we do – we can, as Bruce Schnier says, make something so secure that it can’t be used or can’t be afforded. We need to make voting easy enough not to drive anyone entitled to vote away. We need to make it reliable enough that people trust the results. We need to make the processes by which this is done totally transparent so that people trust the results.

How do we do this?

To do that fixing, there is one election that matters. That is the race for California Secretary of State, and the candidate is Debra Bowen.

I’m asking you to do three things:

1. Watch her debate with her opponent, Bruce McPherson.

2. Watch McPherson’s ad.

3. Once you’ve watched it, I think your position will be pretty clear. Go over to the Bowen website and toss her a few bucks. If you live in California and haven’t voted absentee yet, vote for her. Ask your friends in California to vote for her. If you have voted absentee, note that in many counties the signature-matching software that will validate your absentee ballot is made by Diebold, and has never been through any rigorous testing.

I’d be writing the magisterial post about voting security except that my neighborhood is hip-deep in trick-or-treaters.

I’m on my fifth large bag of candy and fruit snacks with three more in the kitchen before we have to turn out the lights.

Have I mentioned that I love my neighborhood?

Meanwhile, I have nothing to add to the latest John Kerry brouhaha except to point out that Andrew Sullivan said it perfectly:

Is Kerry not content to lose just one election? Does his enormous ego have to insist on losing two?