Pa. moves to update 22-year-old elections, voter registration systems

Upgrades will include voter registration, election-night reporting, lobbying disclosure and campaign finance systems.

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 Commonwealth Media Services

Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt in January 2024 at the East Shore Area Library in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The Department of State has selected a contractor to update the state’s 22-year-old voter registration system. Over the next three years, a technology company called Civix will modernize Pennsylvania’s voter registration, election-night reporting, lobbying disclosure and campaign finance systems. 

“ We went into this new process by working hand in hand with our counties to make sure we’re providing something that they could rely on that would be safe and secure and have no unnecessary delays,” said Secretary of State Al Schmidt.

Those four election-related systems are currently operating independently from each other, but the new system will bring them under one single interface, Schmidt said. Modern data management will also help with transparency and usability, including the type of data the state can pull, he added. 

The contract is for $10.6 million over four years, with three optional one-year extensions. The vendor, Civix, deployed an election management system across seven states for the November 2024 election, according to a press release, which also states the company’s technology has been used in presidential elections since 1996. 

Civix’ first action will be to provide a project plan that will include intermediary deadlines for each of the new system components, Schmidt said. 

The new voter registration component will be in use for the 2028 presidential election, according to a Department of State press release. But Schmidt added that no election director wants to roll out a new system in a presidential year, and the goal is to have the system in place for the municipal elections the year before. 

Thad Hall, Mercer County election director and leader of the Western Pennsylvania Election Personnel Association, welcomes the changes. 

“The new system will help us streamline how we fill out and process registrations and mail ballot requests,” he said. “It’s going to make our workflow a lot easier.”

The future of elections  

The new system will be customizable and will serve the needs of county election officials, who have been closely consulted on this project, Schmidt said. That will allow the new system to adapt to possible changes to elections made by the legislature. 

SURE and systems like it are already doing far more than they were originally designed to do back in 2002, when Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states to have unified voter registration systems. 

“ When HAVA initially required voter registration databases, they really were just lists of registered voters,” said Megan Maier, deputy director of research and partnerships at the election technology nonprofit Verified Voting. 

The system was not designed to handle the over 1.8 million mail-in ballots Pennsylvania voters returned in the 2024 general election, for example. 

Simply being old does not make the current SURE system insecure, Maier said. Pennsylvania has continually updated SURE, both its software and hardware, Schmidt said. The state replaced every piece of hardware before the 2024 elections to speed up connectivity and improve security. Those computers won’t go to waste, Schmidt said, as they can be repurposed once the new system is in place. 

In today’s elections, registration systems are expected to handle much more complex tasks than simply handling registration lists, like handling mail-in voting, early voting, and reporting results in real time on election night. 

Civix’ product will be cloud-based, making it easer to add new functionality as elections continue to change, said CEO Phillip Braithwaite. Other Civix client states already have other features like early voting, so if the Pennsylvania legislature adds that option, the system could be easily updated. 

As part of the contract, Civix is prepared to modify the new system should the legislature make any changes within the next seven years, Braithewaite said. 

Late start to deliver on schedule 

This is Pennsylvania’s second attempt to update the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors. Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration started the process in 2019, only to have the state and the vendor agree to cancel that contract in 2023 under Gov. Josh Shaprio’s administration. 

In state House and Senate hearings, Schmidt has said the vendor was not able to meet contract requirements, and the over $1 million paid to the vendor since Shapiro took office was returned to the state, to be reused in the new contract. 

Now, Schmidt says he is confident Civix will be able to do the job, though the process is already months behind schedule. In March 2024, Schmidt told the House State Government Committee the Department of State would put out the Request for Proposals in the spring, select a vendor in the summer and finalize the contract by the fall. 

“ The Commonwealth procurement process is challenging and sometimes it does take time, but we moved as quickly as possible,” Schmidt said. 

But the state has kept the deadline of having the new system in place by 2028, including rolling the registration system out a year earlier. That deadline is reasonable, Braithwaite said.

The company will first roll out a new campaign finance system in the second half of this year, he said, while working on the other components in the background. 

“ The Shapiro administration has been adamant that we deliver on schedule,” Schmidt said. 

Legislative action still needed 

A new tech platform for election services is not a panacea for all Pennsylvania’s election challenges. Some improvements will require legislative action. 

Transferring registrations between counties is clunky, said Hall, Mercer County’s election director. When a voter moves to a new county and registers to vote, a notice needs to be sent to the old county which needs to release the voter and send a notice back. 

“That dates back to the 1800s when every county had their own paper-based registration system,” Hall said. 

The legislature did not update that section of the law when it created the statewide voter registration system in 2004 and it has been causing headaches for election directors since. Allowing counties to use the new registration system to transfer voters from one county to another would be helpful, Hall said, and would cut down on things like duplicate registrations across the state. 

Hall is also looking to a challenging 2026 election, which will very probably be run on the current SURE system. He’s particularly concerned with the newfound interest across the state in so-called “early voting”. 

Pennsylvania does not have true early voting like other states have. Instead, voters can go through the cumbersome process of showing up to a county or satellite election office, request a mail-in ballot, fill it out then and there, put it in the mail envelope, and hand it back. That takes much more time than simply checking in and voting as if showing up to a polling place, Hall said. 

Only the legislature can create early voting, and it could do so before 2026, he said. It wouldn’t require a new registration system to implement, Hall said. It would require the state to also support counties to purchase electronic poll books to manage early voters. 

Legislators in the House and Senate recently asked Schmidt about what it would take to implement early voting during budget hearings. State Rep. Jennifer O’Mara, D-Delaware County, introduced a bill for early voting which has been referred to the House State Government Committee. She has no cosponsors in the bill.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify a statement on the security stance of the SURE system. 

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