The Secretary of State’s Office plans to overhaul the IT systems used to manage elections and campaign financial disclosure reports. The new system will integrate all of the election division’s operations into a single platform, Secretary of State Jim Condos said Wednesday.
Currently, the division uses separate computer applications for voter registration, absentee ballots, election management, campaign finance and lobbyist disclosure reporting.
The current systems are cumbersome and awkward to use, Condos told lawmakers at a Joint Fiscal Committee meeting on Wednesday.
Once a new system is in place, all the components would be managed within a single operating platform, Condos said. He said it would function similar to Microsoft’s Office suite, in which the software components, such as Word and PowerPoint, are integrated into the same operating system.
The cost of the project, which is scheduled to begin in February 2014, is unclear, Condos said. He said the division will have a better idea of the cost in November after vendors bid on the project.
According to the request for proposals (RFP), the division will announce a vendor to develop the project Oct. 23. The division has spoken with about 10 interested vendors, Condos said.
The project must be operational by January 2015, the beginning of the 2016 general election cycle, the RFP states. The campaign finance component of the new operating system must be completed by July 2014 to support the campaign finance disclosure reporting for next year.
The Secretary of State’s Office has $40,000 that it carried over from FY 2012 for the purpose of developing a new campaign finance operating system to replace their current paper copy filing procedure, Condos said.
He said federal money is available to create a new application to manage federal election operations.
The financial disclosure component of the project will not receive federal money, Condos said. However, federal money will pay for part of an integrated system that includes all of the election division’s operations, such as campaign finance and lobbyist disclosure reporting, he said.
“As a result, we think we can do a good portion of the work using those federal dollars,” Condos said. “We think we can drive the cost down for the other modules.”
Condos said his predecessor, Deb Markowitz, estimated the cost of overhauling the campaign finance system to be between $600,000 and $1 million. However, Condos told the committee that the project would likely cost less.
The new system will make it easier to manage, input and access election information, Condos said.
For example, he said candidates could instantly update their campaign finance disclosure reports online instead of filing a paper copy to the division. The public would then be able to browse through an integrated database with all the candidates’ information, instead of scrolling through scanned PDF files posted on the state’s website.
Condos said the state has successfully digitized its records in the past. For example, Condos remembers seeing stacks of about 40,000 annual professional license renewals with checks attached waiting to be process. These files took about 10 weeks to process, he said. Now about 90 percent of these renewals are processed online.
Correction: An earlier version of this story referring to drivers’ licenses was incorrect.
