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No one should be shocked that Pennsylvania’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system went down for about 90 minutes Thursday morning. The computer system on which most voting activities in the state hinge is a mess, and the state has known this for years.

Speaking on “The Dom Giordano Show” on Philadelphia’s WPHT talk radio, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt described the SURE system as a voter registration database that county boards of elections interface with “all day long.”

When voters register, request a ballot, are sent a ballot, or vote, every move is marked in the Sure System. More than 9 million Pennsylvania residents, every person registered to vote, have data in the SURE System.

“We had an outage for about 90 minutes that prevented many counties from connecting to it earlier this morning, but has been back up for a while now,” Schmidt said. “It was like 9:45 to 11:15 this morning. Voters who applied to vote by mail, whether it’s in person or whatever else, could still do so. It didn’t prevent any of that.”

The SURE System has had problems for a long time.

As I reported for The Epoch Times, in December 2019, Pennsylvania’s then-Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (who is now running for attorney general) wrote a scathing, 192-page report that found “internal control weaknesses in the SURE System related to input and maintenance of voter records. The audit revealed examples of potential inaccuracies, which the report said should be sent to counties to be investigated.”

DePasquale’s report said his office could not “assess the accuracy of the records maintained in the system” and “was unable to review security protocols of the system” because the Department of State “refused to cooperate with the investigation.”

The authors of the report suggested 50 improvements to State Department policies and recommended voter roll maintenance to remove duplicate voter registrations and deceased voters.

In light of what the report uncovered, DePasquale was “unable to establish with any degree of reasonable assurance that the SURE System is secure and that Pennsylvania voter registration records are complete, accurate, and in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and related guidelines.”

Finally, the state decided to do something about it.

The Pennsylvania Department of State signed a $10 million contract on Dec. 28, 2020, with BPro, a South Dakota company, to create the SUREVote system to replace the SURE System. Less than two months later, BPro went public with the news that it had been acquired by a company named KNOWiNK, and the contract that was to run until December 2024 was taken over by the new company. (KNOWiNK is the maker of electronic poll books many voters sign when voting.)

While waiting for the replacement to be built, complaints about SURE continued.

The Pennsylvania House prepared a May 2021 report that reviewed election laws and concluded, “The SURE System is unable to meet the demands of the mail-in voting system and the needs of counties.”

That report detailed problems with SURE, discovered in hearings with county election workers.

Joseph Kantz, chairman of Snyder County Commissioners and Board of Elections, told the committee about lost time “when the SURE system is down.” It takes a long time to reboot, “causing the processing of thousands of ballots to be delayed.”

“Kantz also explained the problems he faces when it comes to alternate addresses being pulled by the SURE system,” the report said. “When the system pulls an alternate address to send a mail-in ballot, this causes the ballot to be sent to the wrong address.”

At that time, county election workers said they were eager to get started with an improved system.

But the Department of State abruptly canceled that contract in December 2023, saying the work was behind schedule, and it did not believe the company would meet the standards in the contract. By then, the state had paid $3.6 million to BPro and KNOWiNK, but had nothing to show for it.

There was not enough time to undergo the bidding process, choose a new contractor, and build a new system, so, nearly five years after DePasquale blew the whistle on the faulty SURE system, Pennsylvania is still using it in the 2024 election.  

The Department of State did not respond to questions for this story.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.