The California Secretary of State's Office likely won't be done certifying a new statewide, centralized voter registration database until August, two months later than originally planned, officials announced Tuesday.
"The VoteCal Project Team has been conducting several activities to prepare VoteCal to be the State’s system of record. These include a mock election, ongoing performance testing, verifying functionality, and analyzing and monitoring data," according to an update Tuesday from the Secretary of State's Office. "To ensure that VoteCal functions as designed, the SOS has decided to continue these activities beyond the original June 2016 timeframe for declaring VoteCal to be the State’s system of record. The SOS now expects to declare VoteCal as the system of record in August 2016."
The final two California counties were connected to VoteCal earlier this year.
VoteCal will enable the state to provide a public website allowing voters to register online, check the status of their ballot, find their polling place, and give voters the ability to see if their vote-by-mail or provisional ballot was counted by their county elections official, according to the Secretary of State's Office.
Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in March that the state will use VoteCal during California's General Election in November.
The $98 million project has been more than a decade in the making and suffered stops and starts. CGI Technologies and Solutions Inc. was selected in 2013 as the system integrator; it was the second attempt at the procurement after the state canceled in 2010 an initial $51 million agreement with Catalyst Consulting Group because of project schedule delays, staffing issues and other factors.
