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Following registration and mailing issues this month, along with letters from a concerned state senator, the Virginia Department of Elections announced the award of a contract in a yearslong plan to replace its current voting technology.
The Canton Group, a Baltimore-based software development company, was announced Monday afternoon as the awardee, and the new system is expected to go live in early 2025.
The announcement comes after the department experienced a few issues this month. In early October, the Department of Elections said it had forwarded about 107,000 voter registration applications “recently submitted” through the DMV to local registrars to fix voting rolls with new registrations, updated addresses and other changes.
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Commissioner of Elections Susan Beals attributed the problem at the time to “intermittent network issues.”
“No voter registration data was lost, but the issue will cause an increase in processing voter registration applications at the local level,” she said in a statement earlier this month.
State Sen. Lionell Spruill Sr., D-Chesapeake, chair of the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee, sent a letter the following day asking for more details and followed up with another letter this past weekend.
“Please provide an explanation to what the problem was, what the solution is, and whether the system is now correctly functioning,” he wrote in his latest letter.
Spruill’s re-upped request also asked for details about another issue that happened late last week. More than 30,000 residents in Northern Virginia received mail with the wrong polling locations. Some residents in Southwest Virginia also received the wrong information, according to the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
Meanwhile, Sen. Jennifer Boysko, D-Fairfax, said she, along with local officials in Fairfax County and the town of Herndon, are “all working collaboratively to make certain that our voters understand where they should be voting and have trust in the process.”
As a state legislator who represents an area affected by the error, however, Boysko questions why the state’s election department sent mailers rather than local registrars.
“Our local jurisdictions know best how to implement these kinds of letters because they do it regularly,” Boysko said. “I mean, that’s my question ... why did they feel like they had to do it from the very beginning? Why didn’t they let the local jurisdictions handle this? And I don’t have that answer.”
Aside from mailing issues, critiques have long simmered for the Virginia Election and Registration Information System, or VERIS, which was recommended for replacement in 2018. By last year, officials sought to purchase a new IT system to run alongside VERIS for this year’s elections as part of a process to transition away from VERIS.
Requests for proposals opened last year, when Democrat Ralph Northam was governor and before Beals had been appointed as the commissioner. According to Monday’s release, three proposals were received and evaluated.
The multiyear project, now that a contract has been awarded, is expected to cost $13.5 million, with an anticipated $2.9 million per year for maintenance and hosting for up to 10 years, the release stated.
“As election technology and security requirements have increased, the need to replace our current voter registration system has become imperative,” Beals said in the release.
She added that the procurement was reviewed by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency and the Office of the Attorney General.
“There is broad support for replacing VERIS, and we were determined to obtain the best solution capable of serving the Commonwealth for years to come,” Beals said.
