The company supplying new voting machines for the upcoming Hawai'i elections has protested an official's ruling that the machines are too expensive and should be put to bid again next year.

The vendor, Hart InterCivic, Inc., filed an appeal in Circuit Court yesterday of an Aug. 8 decision from the state Office of Administrative Hearings regarding the voting machine contract awarded to Hart in January.

The contract, awarded by the state Office of Elections, was priced at $43.4 million for provision of paper eScan and electronic eSlate voting machines through the 2016 elections.

A competitor, Election Systems & Software Inc., complained to the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs that the contract award to Hart was faulty.

Election Systems' bid for the contract was priced at $18.1 million.

Administrative hearings officer Craig Uyehara upheld the Elections Systems complaint earlier this month, ruling that the cost of the contract was "clearly unreasonable."

Uyehara said the real price tag, including the cost of an optional two-year extension through to 2018 elections, was $52.8 million.

Former Hawai'i Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Klein, representing Hart InterCivic, appealed Uyehara's decision late last week, asking that a Circuit Court judge review it and set it aside.

Uyehara's decision was highly critical of how the Elections Office handled the contract award, taking particular aim at the role played by Kevin Cronin, the new chief elections officer who began work in the post in February.

Uyehara ruled that Cronin was unqualified to perform a cost/price analysis of the contract and reached conclusions that were "incomplete, inaccurate, unreliable and misleading."

William Marston, chairman of the state Elections Commission, said last week that a selection panel had evaluated bids for the contract, leaving the newly-appointed Cronin to defend the work of the panel and elections staffers.

"There's no hidden agenda," Marston said. "There was nothing more than an effort, in my mind, to try to select the best system."

Cronin's handling of other elections issues since he took office have drawn other legal fire.

Five Maui residents have sued Cronin and the elections office for failure to adopt administrative rules for use of the Hart machines to transmit votes from the island over telephone lines.

The Republican Party filed another suit Aug. 8 alleging that Cronin and the Office of Elections improperly allowed Democrat Isaac Choy to stand as a state House candidate for the 24th District (Manoa).