ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s secretary of state is buying a new voter registration system for the state’s 7 million voters, a move Republican Brad Raffensperger said on Wednesday will increase security and make data retrieval easier.
The state’s current system is nearly a decade old and has been blamed for slowdowns in the early days of early in-person voting in the 2020 primary, when the system couldn’t access data fast enough to handle large numbers of voters.
“This new system is more advanced, more secure and easier to use, and will give our election officers and my office new tools to better manage our election efforts,” Raffensperger said.
Georgia’s electoral process has been a contentious issue in recent years, culminating in strong criticism of Raffensperger from fellow Republicans who believe he did not do enough to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia in 2020 , followed by a restrictive new electoral law that brought down Raffensperger from the state electoral board.
Officials say the new system will cost less than $5 million, with funding split between leftover bond funds the state borrowed to buy new voting machines and federal money.
The new voter registration system, called the Georgia Registration Voter Information System, is scheduled to go live in March. It comes as county election officials try to ensure that voters are correctly seated in the new electoral districts that are drawn every 10 years for federal, state and local offices. Election officials are also preparing for statewide elections for governor and other offices, which begin with the party primary on May 24.
More than a dozen county election directors came out with Raffensperger to support the change. Douglas County’s Milton Kidd said the change was challenging but expressed confidence that “Douglas County will be ready.”
The state plans to keep the current system online as a backup and redistribute changes in the current system and then transfer the data to the new system.
The new system will allow officials to generate reports faster and make it easier to download data to the tablet computers used at polling stations to access voter records. Raffensperger said voters should notice little to no changes to their online information page or anything else.
Raffensperger promised that the system would be housed on servers that meet federal security standards. In 2017, the state faced questions about election data that could be compromised on a server at Kennesaw State University.
The state will use a database from San Francisco-based software company Salesforce, which will be implemented by Texas-based MTX Group.