With Secretary of State Donetta Davidson getting ready to skip town for her cushy new Federal Election Assistance Commission job, and her office hard at work on the training they should have offered on voter registration before last year's election, I'd like to ask a couple of questions. They're not easy questions to answer, but over the next couple of weeks we'll try diligently. 1) Davidson's performance in the 2004 election was an unqualified disaster. Emergency purge-lists she sent out to the counties two weeks before the election, as it turns out, netted practically no voter fraud. Her poorly-executed dissemination of new rules to county clerks resulted in widespread confusion. Her decision to count only presidential votes on provisional ballots was nationally condemned. What's she being rewarded for with this cushy job, then? 2) When Davidson had to leave town the day before the election, her subordinates took over the process. Chief among them was our dear friend Drew T. Durham, who had just barely weathered the scandal we inadvertently created by publishing allegations of straight-up country racist epithets made against him while he worked for the Texas attorney general. Nobody's made any claims that he did anything wrong while filling in for Davidson, but since then he's moved out of the Secretary of State's office under what one might call "mysterious circumstances."

According to documents we've obtained, Mr. Durham received a poor performance evaluation in his last review by Secretary Davidson. It cites benign shortcomings like being late to meetings occasionally, and the like. But in response to it, Drew Durham offered his resignation. According to documents obtained in a CORA request, the Labor Department had recently completed a "re-organization," and a new position of Inspector General was created -- Durham got it, though apparently in a process that didn't involve approval from either the Department of Labor of the Secretary of State's office. I've discussed previously the relationship between Durham's Labor Department days in 2001-03, his transfer to the Secretary of State's office, and a guy named Brian Mouty. Mouty, as we pointed out in January, appears to be a contractor/state employee whose usefulness is chiefly related to his close association to Accenture Corporation. This becomes significant when you realize that Durham was deeply involved in the awarding of contracts to Accenture for major projects at both Labor ($50 million) and SOS ($10 million). Also significant is the fact that Mouty moved from Labor to SOS with Durham -- before the voter database contract was awarded. What does this all mean? Maybe something rotten, related to the state's procurement of large systems from vendors with a known history of questionable activity -- particularly in the case of Accenture and voter databases. And through a combination of cushy rewards and a little HR sleight-of-hand, it's all staying nice and tidy. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Suppose this has something to do with Owens' refusal yesterday to meet with the state legislative committee investigating purchasing contracts? I realize we've just raised a hell of a lot more questions than we've answered. Stay tuned, because a great deal more is on the way.