Special Reports

9 Investigates: Trying to fix online campaign finance system

By Blair Miller, CMG Washington News Bureau
By Blair Miller, CMG Washington News Bureau

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — For years, North Carolina's Board of Elections has been trying to fix an online campaign finance system in which lawmakers report money that they receive while campaigning -- essentially a database for voters to use to research candidates.

In 2011, the board prepaid nearly $1 million to SOE Software Corporation in Tampa, Florida, to replace its computer system. Channel 9 obtained invoices which show that the state of North Carolina made the payments in 2011, but the state never received the product.

Josh Lawson, spokesman for the Board of Elections, said they're well aware of what Channel 9 identified.

"We have not heard from SOE and whether they plan to deliver our product at all," Lawson said. "The new leadership in our agency took this as a priority within weeks of taking office, and we proactively sought out the auditor's office, who conducted an audit of this matter."

That audit identified key government oversights that were ignored

, including the fact that the state paid for the service upfront. That is not supposed to happen.

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Also, any state contract for more than $500,000 is supposed to be reviewed by the state's chief information officer. That didn't happen because the deal was broken up into two payments -- each just shy of the $500,000 mark.

"What's hard there is that current law, and the law at the time would have prevented this," Lawson said.

The BOE's executive director at the time, Gary Bartlett, signed off on all of it. He is no longer with the agency.

Bartlett agreed to talk with Eyewitness News anchor Blair Miller on the phone and said he worked on the contracts after getting approval from an internal committee at the state Board of Elections, named "ITS."

"Why couldn't it be just one payment?" Miller asked.

"That is what was suggested to me by ITS, and that's what we did," Bartlett said. "Yes, I was the director of the Board of Elections, but someone at a state agency was saying this is how it needed to be packaged."

Channel 9 also tried to contact SOE to ask why the company never delivered the new program. Miller called every employee with SOE who was listed in the contract and left messages and emails.

None of them have responded.

State Rep. Jason Saine of Lincoln County is in charge of the legislative committee that handles projects like this one. He said the program would have helped provide more transparency from politicians.

While the agreements were made long before he was elected, Saine said he can't understand how it happened.

"It looks really fishy," Saine said. "It looks almost as if somebody was friends with somebody else in state government and found a way to get around our contracting process."

Saine is already working on legislation to make the approval process more clear for any state agency that's working on contracts with outside companies, and reinforces the rules against the state prepaying for anything.

"That makes it a lot less sketchy in terms of who's dealing and who's negotiating," Saine said.

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