Postcards from the Lege blog AAS 11/3/09
Elections system pulled from IBM data center contract

IBM Corp.’s failure to protect state information under an $863 million data center consolidation contract has prompted the Texas Secretary of State to pull its elections system from the project.

In August, the Secretary of State got a "wake-up call" when a server crash led to a 13-day outage of the agency’s business records filing system. It exposed serious weaknesses in IBM’s ability to recover lost data, said Secretary of State spokesman Randall Dillard.

If a similar failure had affected the agency’s statewide voter registration data at the time of an election, Texas counties would not have been able to verify new voters as required by federal law.

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Federal money that pays for the mandated statewide voter registration system will cover the $7.9 million cost of the new data home for the elections system, known as Texas Elections Administration Management, Dillard said.

The Secretary of State’s data system will probably operate independently at least through the 2011 redistricting process, Dillard said.