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The Calvoter Project

In late 1995, the Secretary of State was authorized by the Legislature and Governor to begin development of our first-ever statewide voter registration database. By building this cumulative database and eliminating many of the duplicate or erroneous registrations, known as "deadwood", currently on the 58 county's voter rolls, the state and counties can reduce election costs and take another step toward prevention of fraudulent voting. For the first time, county elections officials will be able to maintain their voter registration files with the assistance of other elections offices throughout the state, as well as interfacing with the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Duplicate registrations can be cancelled, persons who have died can be removed from voter rolls, and cross-county registrations can be updated once the CALVOTER database is in place.

After a competitive bid process, a contract was awarded to a consortium of private vendors (Computer Resources Group/ Natoma Technologies/Radian International/Election Systems and Software) to put the CALVOTER system in place. During 1997, all 58 county elections offices were provided with a personal computer and network connections to become part of the new Secretary of State wide area network. Initial testing of voter file integrity began in the Spring of 1998. Currently we have over 57 of the state's 58 counties on-line with the system, representing over 99.9% of the state's registered voters.

Phase II of the CALVOTER project is the development and implementation of a statewide candidate filing and elections reporting system. Currently we are finishing the building the Phase II application. We have used this application's candidate filing database to track state-level candidates for the March 2000 Primary Election. We have just gone into production with the Phase II vote reporting system. This system will replace our older mainframe-based system for elections reporting. We anticipate that this system will not only be extremely easy to use but will also significantly speed up the process of collecting and compiling vote reporting data from our state's 58 counties.

Come back and visit us for more information as we roll out CALVOTER.