Pennsylvania will be overhauling it’s election software over the next few years, and county election workers are set to experience the most day-to-day change.

The new contract was announced this month; a $10.6 million agreement with government software company Civix. With the contract, many of Pennsylvania’s election systems— election night reporting, lobbying disclosure, and campaign finance— will get redone and rolled into one new system.

At the heart of the overhaul is Pennsylvania’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Elections (SURE); which is the state’s voter registration database.

The database was created in 2003.

“The current system is a hard coded, ancient system,” Thad Hall said, elections director for Mercer County.

Any minor change to SURE requires huge amounts of recoding—which is expensive. Multiple county officials say it is not user friendly. Old tech combined with poorly written election law can mean occasional sloppy record keeping.

News of an overhaul has been welcome by county election officials.

“It’s been a long time coming. We’re pretty excited.” Alan Hall said, county commissioner chair of Susquehanna County. “If this works like it should work, it's going to make our jobs not only a lot easier, but we're going to become a lot more efficient in what we're doing.”

The State Department tried to update the system in prior years; a contract signed in 2020 fell through in 2023 and cost Pennsylvania around $1 million… for nothing in return.

State Secretary Al Schmidt is determined not to let this contract run foul.

“One big change that we made from the past is we brought on a chief modernization officer to oversee our modernization projects,” Schmidt said. “[And] Project managers to make sure that everything keeps moving.”

The goal is to migrate all the data from the old system to the new system in time for the 2028 presidential election cycle. Doing that switch over in a year with lower voter turnout (likely 2027) will give time for training and smoothing out bugs.

“We have to make sure our people get the training, that they have the time and the ability to go on the system,” Alan Hall said, "and do the training so they understand what they're doing.”

Alan Hall said he’s more concerned with the new system coming online when the state knows it’s secure and well designed; over it coming online on a certain date.

When the system switch does eventually happen, the average voter shouldn't see a disruption in service.

“In fact, what they're going to see is a much faster online system, a better work flow for that,” Thad Hall said.

Thad Hall says that while a modern system will be more user friendly, Pennsylvania election law can still be outdated. Pennsylvania is one of the few states that requires registration be transferred from county to county, instead of voters simply filling out a change of address form and that being enough.

“It’s like we took registration laws, and just added the work ‘electronic’ in 2004 to match the creation of the SURE system,” Thad Hall said.