State says new voter registration system needed before 2028

(The Center Square) – Pennsylvania has wanted to upgrade its aging voter registration system for several years, but stumbles have occurred.

Legislators were told Tuesday that an updated system is needed not only before the next presidential election in 2028 but will also be ready.

“There really is no waiting – we have to complete a new system in advance of the next presidential election,” said Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt during a budget hearing for the Department of State held by the House of Representatives Appropriation Committee.

“I would never roll out a new system in a presidential election cycle,” Schmidt added.

The process to update Pennsylvania’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, known as SURE, was started in 2019 after it was determined the system, created in 2003, was substantially outdated. The system is used by election officials to add, remove or update the status of every voter in the commonwealth. Mentioned during Tuesday’s hearing, the data in the system is constantly updated at the county level to ensure the voter rolls are accurate.

Because of growing instability within the 20-year-old system, a $10.7 million contract was signed in 2020 with South Dakota-based elections software company BPro Inc., which was later acquired by Missouri-based election software and technology company KNOWiNK. The plan was to have a new system by early 2023 in advance of the 2024 presidential election.

Schmidt said at the start of the Shapiro administration, “It became clear that the vendor could not complete the contract, the commonwealth terminated the contract and clawed back more than $1 million of taxpayer money that had been spent on that.”

According to state Treasury Department information, approximately $2.5 million of the $10.7 million contract was paid out to the vendor prior to termination.

The secretary noted that, in light of the contract termination decision in early 2023, efforts were made to prepare for the 2024 presidential election. The commonwealth worked with all 67 counties to replace existing election-related hardware and upgrade the connectivity of each county’s election operations.

We “made sure their hardware was reliable and their connectivity was fast, so that when they were processing an avalanche of [voter] registration applications, mail-in ballot applications and everything else county election officials have to interact with in the SURE system, that it would be reliable and it wouldn’t be held up unnecessarily… by a system in need of replacement,” said Schmidt, noting those systems worked well for the 2024 election cycle.

With the contract termination, the agency also began seeking a new vendor to provide a SURE system replacement. Schmidt told lawmakers the process with a new vendor is moving along, with the plan to have a new system before the next presidential election.

“We have completed all the negotiations with the new vendor, it [the agreement] is currently being circulated for signatures and sign-off from everyone who needs to, they will then present us with a project plan that will detail when all the deliverables are due to us,” explained Schmidt.