Mark Grebner is a Michigan voter list consultant and an elected county supervisor in East Lansing now doing business in this state as Wisconsin Voter Lists. Grebner, who disdains suits and wears his hair long, says Wisconsin elections officials are about to make the same mistakes as Michigan election officials made when they started to put together a list some 10 years ago. Like Wisconsin, Michigan has no party registration.

He was in Madison recently to attend a briefing on how the state Elections Board plans to form a voter list, as mandated by the federal government in the wake of the Florida presidential election controversy of 2000.

Grebner, complaining he wasn't a qualified vendor even though he has already put together a Wisconsin list of 4 million voters, personal data and history for some $800,000, warns the Wisconsin experience is "just going to be a great big mess. It's just going to burn an insane amount of money. And you know, at the end of this, I'll have a file that's usable and is accurate, and the state of Wisconsin will have, I don't know, the ashes of $40 million."

Elections Board Executive Director Kevin Kennedy says Grebner and his firm could be involved in the process, but they need to go through the Department of Administration's vendor system in order to qualify and apply. He says it'll be a two-part job and that the state now is seeking a consultant to guide it through the first phase of a project that is targeted for completion in 2006. About 15 vendors are competing.

He says Grebner's numbers and contentions are off the mark. "What we're doing now is to make sure we don't spend that kind of money," Kennedy says. "His vision of a list is much different. ...He's in a much different business than we are. There's a lot more to it."

Kennedy says while Grebner's business is suited to political clients, the state list must serve local clerks. The state is going to have to require voter registration in every municipality. Currently, registration is done in only 320 of the state's 1,850 municipalities, but that comprises 76 percent of the voting population, Kennedy says. The list and accompanying programs will be "a tool for municipal clerks to run their elections," he says.

See Kennedy's memo to Elections Board members regarding upcoming legislation worth $477,000 to implement the federal Help America Vote Act in Wisconsin:

An Assembly committee hearing is planned Friday to review proposed Elections Board legislation. See the agenda.

In the meantime, Grebner would like to get a piece of the action -- proclaiming it won't put him out of business.

"No, I don't want the whole contract, because the whole contract involves big, insane things," he says. "I would be happy to just be a consultant. I would be happy to get like 1 percent of the money, and like actually make it work. That's my dream. "

WisPolitics Editor Jeff Mayers interviewed Grebner on Oct. 8.

Jeff Mayers: Tell me about PPC, and tell me about how long you've been in the business.

Mark Grebner: I'm 50 these days, believe it or not. I started doing political stuff with computers in 1973, 30 years ago, and it was on punched cards. ... I'm a county commissioner, which is equivalent to County Board of Supervisors here. And I represent the MSU (Michigan State University) campus on the County Board of Commissioners. ...I'm the longest serving member. I was first elected as a leftist student radical with long hair. And I try to maintain that position, still representing the campus even though I'm older than their parents.

Mayers: You live in East Lansing.

Grebner: I do. I live right near the campus. ...About like 25 years ago, it became a business. It wasn't a business the first five years; it was just me helping campaigns. And so, for about 25 years, I've actually been like charging people and selling stuff. Until about five years ago, it was entirely Michigan. And I have a position in Michigan which is pretty close to a monopoly. And I would just kind of sort of honestly assert that, basically, we set a standard for price and quality, and we challenge our competitors to meet it, and we crush them. It's a very simple system.

Mayers: But in Michigan, you have to register to vote. You have to register as a partisan?

Grebner: No, no, no. Michigan has no party registration. For five years, we sort of did have party registration. Then the state was kind enough to order it all destroyed, but not until I had a copy of it.

Mayers: OK

Grebner: So, it worked out pretty well. ....And then in about 1998, I decided to move to into Wisconsin, because I knew that the situation here was utterly impossible, although I wasn't completely clued into the way that people were really building voter files. And so, I now realize that the first 10 phone calls I made, roughly seven of them had been indicted, and the other three are cooperating witnesses. (laughter) But none of those people needed any help at all. They all had their voter file situation completely under control, but none of them could explain how. And now I understand how.

Mayers: Well, how?

Grebner: Well, they had other sources of data. They had sources of data which didn't cost them any money. I mean, if one wanted to be impolite, one would say that they had discovered the art of drinking somebody else's soda by putting a straw in it. And so, the state of Wisconsin was paying for it all, of course. And the data was unbelievably bad. And yeah, they had their list.

Mayers: You would maintain their lists weren't very good.

Grebner: The lists were bad because there was no quality control, because they were being keyed by individual offices for particular purposes. And once they were transmitted from one person to another, there was no traceability, there was no responsibility. So, whenever anybody got a list, you never knew what its real source was, you never knew what had really been keyed. And the people who did do the keying, largely, had been hired as legislative staffers with degrees in political science and had no real interest in being data entry clerks.

Mayers: Right.

Grebner: And so, the lists were terrible, but they were free. So, now I arrive on the scene and everybody has free, terrible lists that they can't describe where they got them. And so, one of the problems that my firm is facing, and you know, it's just a continuing problem, is that everybody assumes that the market is still crooked and that everybody lies about sources and that we're misrepresenting what we sell, and that they don't have to sign contracts or live up to the contracts.

Mayers: Why don't you say how you guys do your lists and how complete it is.

Grebner: Well, it essentially covers, it does cover the whole state. It is, I'd say, complete. It is based on a copy of the Wisconsin driver's license file, the last time it was available to the public, which is about two years ago now. And since then, we update it. We change addresses for people, and so forth, as we move them around the state.

Mayers: But how do you physically do that? I don't think people understand what it takes to do that. Because if I go to register to vote on same-day registration, I don't have to really give up all that much information.

Grebner: Well, you have to tell them your name and address, and that's enough to link you either to an old record in the driver's license file, which has your date of birth. Or, it at least allows us to create a new record for you, maybe without a date of birth, which we can then link from some other source. So, we've created a file for about four million Wisconsin adults that has name, address, date of birth for almost everybody, phone number, ward, township, city, county and each election in which you've voted.

Mayers: Yeah, but how do you go out there and actually get this stuff?

Grebner: There are two main sources of election data. One is the 250, or so, municipal voter files that are maintained electronically. Those are a horrible mess. Those are just a huge mess. And by the way...

Mayers: You mean 250 different municipalities maintain such things.

Grebner: Yes, or try to. In many cases, they should stop. They do it as things like Excel files, you know, spread sheets. There are people who maintain Word documents. There's one municipality that I think has now quit, but until six months ago, maintained it on magnetic tape, I mean, half-inch open reel mainframe computer tape. So, we still have to convert that. So, we collect these 250 files, which are all in utterly different formats, convert them to same format, match them to our main file, update the main file with the information. And that takes care of 65 percent, or so, of the state.

The other 35 percent of the state is not available in any way electronically. It's only available on paper. And for those paper records ...we don't buy copies, generally, because copies would be fantastically expensive. So, for those, we have a person, actually somebody just worked for us for two months. He drove around the state in my car and stayed at every Motel Six in the state, I think, and went to 52 or 53 counties and photographed, using a digital camera, photographed 100,000 pages of records, which got us the March 2003, non-partisan general. And in some counties, we still needed the November 2002 partisan general election. So, he photocopied the election records, covering about 100,000 pages for pretty much those two elections. So, those then go back to my data-entry people, who then key it against the existing file and update the records.

So, that file is complete, and is in very good shape, and has been sold to both political parties, and you know, is generally available. And that, I've sunk in ... call it $800,000 that I've sunk into that file. And it has voter history going back to 1996, pretty much complete. I mean, there's always some problem, you know. At one point, the Vilas County Clerk didn't have an election (file) because (one of the legislative house) caucus had borrowed the election and lost it. So, they had literally no election records for the 2000 general election. And no matter how many times we went back there, the truth is they didn't have them because (somebody) here in Madison had lost the data. The guy had actually sent them his box of election records. So, they were just gone. So, for a long time, we didn't have anything from then. So, there are little gaps like that where basically the public records are completely unavailable.

So, the file is pretty accurate. We correct people's addresses by submitting the file every six months or every year to the Post Office under a system called National Change of Address (NCOA) to get new addresses. And there are also commercial sources of information of where people's current residential addresses are, and we match with a bunch of other things. But basically name, address, phone number, date of birth, election history.

Mayers: Some people may not even know this is done and they may be surprised, people who aren't in politics. It seems like this could be used for an insidious purpose, maybe given to a bunch of telemarketers.

Grebner: Well, there are lists for telemarketing. We don't, I mean, nobody really uses it for telemarketing. Basically, it's just useful for politics. The fact that somebody voted or didn't vote doesn't really help you sell used cars. It really helps you sell candidates for judge. And so, I mean, we don't do much commercially. We've tried; it just doesn't ever work. They have very different markets.

Mayers: Are you operating in any other states?

Grebner: We do two states, Wisconsin and Michigan. Outside of that, I do technical services for consulting purposes.

Mayers: Now tell me, you're having a little problem with the Wisconsin Elections Board. Tell me what's going on from your point of view.

Grebner: Basically, the federal law -- came along and in a big, dim-witted crude way said you need a list of registered voters.

Mayers: Everybody needs one.

Grebner: Yeah, and here's $25 or $50 million, or some amount of money from the federal government to build a list of registered voters.

Mayers: $25 million?

Grebner: Or more. That $25 million is kind of like the lowest number it mentions. Now, I've built this file already, I just want to point out, for under a million...

Mayers: But it's virtually done.

Grebner: Yeah, well, it's as done as their file would ever be, because you always have more work to do. But you know, it's done through some date. ... So, the state of Wisconsin is now going out in a big dim-witted way to build a list of registered voters. But the problem is that Wisconsin law and Wisconsin practice doesn't emphasize registration. Registration is almost a foreign concept. And so, an important problem here is that it's not the right approach. Maybe there are two kinds of problems. Maybe I'll go back to my personal problem with it, which is that the state of Wisconsin has just already determined that I'm not an appropriate vendor to plan to build this list. ...

Mayers: I see, so you're not allowed to bid for this?

Grebner: I can't even bid, because it turns out I'm not a qualified person to plan to build a voter file.

Mayers: Who is?

Grebner: They told me you have to be on one of these two registries of vendors for the state of Wisconsin who are qualified to do planning and electronic government implementation, or something. Long names, I don't know. ...And one of them is to do the planning process to convert the 250 or 300 or 350 municipal files. Well, I'm not even qualified to plan to do the work that I've already done five times. And the contract for doing the planning will be more than the cost of doing the conversions, because the conversions only cost between $25,000 and $50,000. To do the complete conversion is probably about $25,000. To me. I mean, I would charge the state more.

Mayers: You mean at cost, that's what it costs.

Grebner: It did cost us about $25,000. And that's actually paying each municipality for their file. So, I assume the state wouldn't have to pay them, so that would be even less. But anyway, the cost of planning to do the conversion, I'm sure will be more than the cost to me of doing the conversion. But I'm not eligible to plan to do the conversion because I'm not really competent to do the planning for the work that I already do. Now, of course, somebody could plan to do the conversion by having me do it. And like the entire answer to the second deliverable could be, "Have Mark Grebner and Wisconsin Voter Lists do the work." Period. That would be a complete plan, because we've already know how to do the work and we've already done all these conversions successfully and pretty well.

Mayers: Why doesn't the state of Wisconsin just buy your list?

Grebner: Well, it wouldn't be exactly what they needed, but also because that's not how they think. They think that they need a list of registered voters. ...They shouldn't be interested in registered voters. There are a bunch of reasons. But registered voters is a snare and a delusion. It's the wrong direction. In the first place, a third of the state doesn't register to vote now, does not register to vote, right? Two-thirds of the state registers to vote, because they're in municipalities that have same-day registration But the other third has no registration requirement at all. OK, you simply cannot register in the small municipalities. There's no such process. If you fill out a registration form, it's just thrown away, or maybe it's stored in an attic, but it's not used for anything, because there's no registration.

Mayers: But how do I vote, though, if I'm a new resident?

Grebner: You just vote. Whether you're a new resident or an old resident, you just show up and vote. In municipalities of under 5,000 people that have not chosen to register voters in Wisconsin, you just show up and vote. There's no ID requirement. There are no other requirements; you just show up and vote. So, in those place, the idea of building a list of all the registered voters makes no sense at all. ...

But now let's focus on the two-thirds of the state where registration at least has a legal meaning. Seventy to 75 percent of all registrations in Wisconsin occur on Election Day. What the hell is the purpose in building a list of people who register to vote, which isn't available until after the election is conducted? I mean, how is it relevant to the election process? I mean, and I asked that question. Is there some idea that registration will occur before the election? That's also not an appropriate question. They are not going to answer it?

Mayers: What does the federal law call for?

Grebner: It doesn't call for anything. It just calls for a list of registered voters. ...

Mayers: So what's the solution?

Grebner: The solution is a semantic one, but it's to realize that you can include the necessary element to get the federal money, while building something useful. Build a list of people who are potential voters. It's a list of people who appear to have at least some of the qualifications of voters. And the legislation, if you actually got the Legislature to adopt something and have the governor to sign it, which may be difficult, would just call on the state government to provide all the information it has to help build this file.

So, for example, DMV and whoever maintains personal IDs would provide the DMV and personal ID information. That already tells you they're residents, they're 18 years of age.

Mayers: They're potential voters.

Grebner: They're potential voters. Now, if somebody has voted, that tells you they're also U.S. citizens, right, because it would've been illegal to vote. And if a person registers, as some people do, then that also tells you they're U.S. citizens. But you can construct from this the information of what ward they live in. So, if they contact you in any way, like Web, or whatever, you can put them in the right order. You can have their name ready for them when they show up. You have the information about their age, their residency status, their citizenship status, and you can be ready for them to vote. Now, on there is a list of people who are registered. So, on this would be a list of registered voters. It would include a list of all the registered voters. And the only reason to have that is so you get your federal money, because you don't want to blow the federal money. ...

Mayers: But what you're saying here is that the federal government is wasting a lot of dough, too, because you've proven that you can go into a state of five million people and build a list for under $1 million.

Grebner: ... It is funny that they literally have, as a deliverable in this contract, a proposal to create a plan for converting the municipal files.

Mayers: Which you've already done.

Grebner: Which we've done five times, because every time there's an election, we have to go collect another set and convert them. There's another deliverable, which involves estimating the number of people who will be required to key punch the names of people who register to vote. And the answer to that is we already do that, and it's one FTE for the entire state. There's only 70,000, or so, people per year in Wisconsin who register to vote before Election Day. Now, Election Day registrations will take more effort. But you understand, they're not asking people to propose to key punch it, they're asking people to propose a planning process to determine the number of people who will be necessary to key punch it. And I can tell you the answer is one. We already do it. One. We're done with the planning. ...

But the point is, (federal law) just says you have to have a list of all the registered voters. And if all the registered voters are in two-thirds of the state, and they don't include all the people who are eligible to vote, you still have met the requirements of federal law. And you could also build something that would actually be useful to running an election, which is, now, let me go back to what I'm saying -- you'll just list the potential voters. Let's just take a really clear case. The Department of Corrections posts to that every convicted felon. See, it would actually be useful. And so, now you note 50,000 people in the state who are disqualified from the franchise because they are convicted of felonies. Now let's say one of those people shows up to vote. Under the system, as the state is envisioning it, if somebody is removed from the rolls for being a felon, he's not on the rolls, right. If he shows up, what happens?

Mayers: He's added.

Grebner: He's added. Right, it's real easy. What a stupid system. I mean, it has no control at all.

Mayers: All right, let's make it clear. You'd like to do this. You'd like to get the contract.

Grebner: No, I don't want the whole contract, because the whole contract involves big, insane things which involves...

Mayers: Maybe it involves a lot of money, though.

Grebner: Yeah, but I would be happy to just be a consultant. I would be happy to get like 1 percent of the money and like actually make it work. That's my dream.

Mayers: Well, whether or not the state does this, will it put you out of business?

Grebner: Well, no, I don't think so. In the first place, they wouldn't have it ready until 2010 for real use. I mean, so I've got seven years anyway. And the experience in Michigan has been very interesting. In Michigan, we've had a Qualified Voter File --that's what it's called in Michigan. It's been in the works since 1994. So, it's been nine years. And at this point, I think I have a complete monopoly in the state, and that essentially, all the business in the state comes to me, because my file is better than the state's file.

Mayers: So, the state (of Michigan) has a file which people can purchase?

Grebner: Yes, for $160 or $180.

Mayers: And then you have a Michigan file that you charge...?

Grebner: $100,000, let's say, for unlimited use for, you know, there are some clients who pay as much as $100,000 for it.

Mayers: But people will pay for yours because it's good?

Grebner: That's right.

Mayers: It's better than the $160 one that they can get from the state.

Grebner: Yeah, the deal is, you know, that having 100,000 people on the file who are officially registered and who are dead, you know, it doesn't really improve the quality of the list.

Mayers: Is that right? There's 100,000 people...

Grebner: There's 100,000 people who are dead who are on the state file.

Mayers: So, there is a state file, and you have continued to do business even though there's a state file? .

Grebner: Yeah. Well, one of the nice things in Michigan is that the state was kind enough to order all the party ID information destroyed five years ago, so it's not available to the state, basically, but I have it. I collected it all before it was destroyed. ...But I'm sure in Wisconsin, we'll have the same sort of thing, that for quite a while, there'll be a pretty good market niche. I'm not worried about that. And it's, you know, eventually going to happen one way or the other. But the idea is that I'm building a file. I've built a file. The file is, you know, accurate and useful, and so on. But in the meantime, it just bothers me to see the state of Wisconsin...

Mayers: Go down the same path?

Grebner: Well, and if they do what they're doing, if they really build a list of registered voters, it's not going to be any competition. I mean, it's just going to be a great big mess. It's just going to burn an insane amount of money. And you know, at the end of this, I'll have a file that's useable and is accurate, and the state of Wisconsin will have, I don't know, the ashes of $40 million.

Mayers: So, why would you help create it? Why would you help them do it right? Wouldn't that put you out of business?