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More than a year after the Pennsylvania Department of State canceled a contract to upgrade the state’s voter registration system, there’s still no replacement contract in place.
The state has been trying since 2019 to upgrade the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE, a database of the state’s voters that was built in the early 2000s and still undergirds many of the functions of running elections.
Local election officials complain that the system is outdated, has a tendency to crash, and requires complex workarounds for some processes.
State officials had hoped to have a replacement contract for the upgrade in place months ago, but have not said what is holding it up.
Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt told state lawmakers in March 2024 that the department would release a new request for proposals in the spring, select a vendor by summer, and have a contract in place by the fall. The department did release its request for proposals in late May, and bids were due in August, but it hasn’t yet announced the new vendor or finalized a contract.
Matt Heckel, a spokesperson for the department, said the upgrade contract was in “active procurement” and that rules governing procurement prevented the department from saying more. Heckel did not address a question about Schmidt’s March testimony or say whether there was an updated timeline for finalizing a contract.
“That said, we feel confident we will have the new system fully operational by the 2028 primary election, if not before,” Heckel said.
Upgrade effort started over five years ago
SURE is a crucial tool election officials use to add, remove, or update the status of every voter in the state. County election offices rely on it to check voter registrations, manage mail ballots, and generate the poll books used in every election to check in voters at precincts.
Pennsylvania began using SURE in 2003, a year after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act requiring states to create centralized voter registries. Before that, voter rolls were often created and maintained by individual counties.
The department initially sought bids to replace SURE in 2019, and in December 2020 it signed a $10.7 million contract with South Dakota-based elections software company BPro Inc.
The project was scheduled to wrap up by early 2023, so that the new system would be in place for the 2024 presidential election. But delays pushed the projected rollout into this year. In December 2023, the company and the Department of State agreed to cancel the contract, the department said, after it concluded that the company “will not meet those timelines and contractual standards,” according to an email sent to counties at the time.
The prior contract set a 743-day timeline for developing, testing, and launching the new system, so if a new contract is signed soon with a similar timeline, the projected completion date would be in early 2027.
Local election officials who spoke with Votebeat and Spotlight PA said they’ve been told the department is still working on details of a new contract, and they believe they will be using SURE at least through the 2026 election.
They’re well acquainted with SURE’s pitfalls. Mercer County elections director Thad Hall pointed out that the system had a daylong outage in the period leading up the November 2022 election. He also said the design isn’t user-friendly, pointing to a complex, multistep system for processing mail ballot applications. Since voting early in Pennsylvania requires casting a mail ballot in person, that can lead to delays for voters.
Devin Rhoads, the Snyder County election director, estimated that each application for a mail ballot takes 10 to 15 minutes to process.
“That creates a big backlog, so either the SURE system needs to be fixed or we need real early voting,” Hall said. He added that political parties encouraged their voters to vote early before the 2024 election, fueling demand. Election workers, he said, felt “crushed.”
In preparation for the 2024 election, the Department of State began upgrading parts of the current system by replacing the terminals that connect counties to the centralized system, hoping to avoid the types of outages seen in 2022. The state largely avoided such issues in 2024, other than a 90-minute outage in October.
Hall said those upgrades helped, but “there’s only so much they can do” to fix the current system.
“It's not designed in a modern way,” he said. “Fixing the things you think are simple are not, because of the way it’s coded.”
Two parts to the system
Sean Drasher, elections director in Lebanon County, stressed that while the system is old, that doesn’t mean it’s not secure. He drew a distinction between the data in the SURE system — which only election officials can access, and which they keep updated year-round — and the interface election workers use to access that data, which is the part that needs fixing.
It is not intuitively designed, he said, and it can be difficult for election workers to do simple tasks like register new voters or pull the types of reports they need to do their jobs.
“I think some big thinkers on the project need to take a step back and say ‘OK, we have all this data. It’s secure. Now we need to make an interface that is easy for the end users,’” he said. “You shouldn't have to be trained in database queries to get what you want.”
Drasher and Hall separately told Votebeat that they felt the Department of State was moving in the right direction to ensure the next version of the project was successful, highlighting the hiring of a chief modernization officer and a project manager.
Drasher likened the effort to an office upgrade project that has been underway in Lebanon County for several years, which has been delayed because of complications coordinating between multiple parts of government and unforeseen developments, such as a discovery of asbestos.
Projects that touch multiple levels of government and deal with critical processes, like the SURE project does, can be complicated in unforeseeable ways, he said.
“There are all these pieces and they can't mess it up,” he said, adding, “Hopefully it will be in place by the next presidential election.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
