Young County to beta test voter database system

The commissioners of Young County agreed to beta test and help certify a voter database system, called VoterFocus,from VR Systems during their meeting Tuesday, Oct. 15.

Elections Administrator Lauren Sullivan said she has been experiencing issues with the county’s current voter database system.

“So we have talked several times about a voter database that was built over the top of me,” Sullivan said. “I kind of likened it to a house on stilts. TEAM (Texas Elections Administration Management System) is the free voter database that the state has given to every county. I say it is free, it’s not free, but we don’t pay into with our county dollars. It has some limitations, you are getting what you are paying for. Right now to run an election, I am in to six different places to do one activity. It takes a lot of time and it is not very user friendly at all.”

The elections administrator said she was informed the TEAM database is going to take years to get to the point where she needs it to be.

“I have talked to two voter software companies for the last couple of years,” Sullivan said. “As I was headed to Austin a couple weeks ago, one of them called and said that during the last legislative session, the state wants to now pretty much have everything we (the company) do certified by the Secretary of State.”

She said this pushed the company to offer a year’s worth of voter database services for free if the county partners with them to be their certification vehicle.

“They would be able to get to our TEAM database and look at our voter files and make sure they all integrate, in return for us doing the beta testing basically,” Sullivan said.

The elections administrator added VR Systems is based out of Florida and nearly all the counties in Florida use the company.

“This would take my six places that I go and look for voter activity and put it in one place,” Sullivan said. “Everything would be  together, everything would be backed on the server and everything would be in one spot, which is just blowing my mind because I have done this piecemeal thing for so long.”

She said this system will help out in many different aspects including absentee voting and redistricting.

“I see this (system) being a big advantage during any redistricting that could happen,” Sullivan said. “Right now, when I redistrict I have to go street by street, block by block and manually input every house along that. We ran into trouble with that in certain elections where people were put into wrong districts and there was a whole big group of them that could have changed an election and we didn’t know it. So this will be a little more accurate, it will be based on maps.”

After the first year, the commissioners will have the option to continue into a maintenance and operations agreement with VR Systems for $12,000 to $13,000 a year.

“It is the third-party cost that they are passing along,” Sullivan said. “They are not adding anything next year, they are just making their money back. We are never going to pay the same amount as anybody else.”

She added the county will need to add a dedicated server for the elections administrator, but an auditor said they were going to need to get one soon anyways. The cost of a server is $7,000.

For the rest of the story, see the Saturday, Oct. 19 edition of The Graham Leader.