Jacobsen says new election system 'not ready'
Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen announced Monday that the state will hold off on its transition to a new statewide election management system, indicating in a statement that the system has not met all the criteria required for a previously slated January launch. The decision, made in consultation with a third-party vendor and a group of county election administrators, resolves for now a concern voiced by local election officials about the integrity of the upcoming 2022 elections.
“If the established criteria had been met, the system would have been implemented,” Jacobsen, a Republican, said in her statement. “Montana will not launch an election management system that isn’t ready, and it’s not ready.”
Monday’s announcement came on the heels of a detailed discussion last Thursday, when Jacobsen and her staff updated the Legislature’s State Administration and Veterans’ Affairs (SAVA) Committee on the transition to a new election system, which is called ElectMT. During that meeting, SOS Elections and Voter-Services Manager Stuart Fuller, who is heading the project, explained that in end-to-end testing of ElectMT this month, “some of the system simply didn’t pass.” Fuller added that some individual functions that didn’t pass testing weren’t critical to the decision about whether to launch ElectMT, “but there are several that are critical for go-live.”
The state’s current election system, Montana Votes, was first launched statewide during the 2006 general election after nearly four years of development and testing. County election officials use it for a wide array of voter services, from registering voters and updating voter information to distributing and processing ballots, and will continue to do so as ElectMT development moves forward.
Read more: https://montanafreepress.org/2021/12/20/montana-election-system-transition-delayed/