It runs zkCli.sh and dumps its output to a temporary file, then greps that file for "accumulo" (specifically looking for the /accumulo directory in ZooKeeper). But, if the ZooKeeper host has "accumulo" in its name, this gets included in a log message, and so the state concludes that Accumulo has already been set up even if it hasn't.
dmaze@devhub2:~$ salt dmaze-dg-perf-acc00 cmd.run 'cat /tmp/acc.status'
dmaze-dg-perf-acc00:
2014-09-06 01:05:23,177 [myid:] - INFO [main:ZooKeeper@438] - Initiating client connection, connectString=dmaze-dg-perf-acc00:2181 sessionTimeout=30000 watcher=org.apache.zookeeper.ZooKeeperMain$MyWatcher@637a7476
If instead you had named the ZK host something like "accumulo-master", this would show up in that connectString parameter, and the grep would incorrectly succeed.