Georgia's previous voter registration system, ElectioNet (eNet), struggled to handle high levels of early voting in 2020, leading to crashes and long lines. Residents trying to vote reportedly faced waits stretching more than eight hours, until vendor Civix added additional capacity to the system. In 2022, issues updating eNet after redistricting reportedly led to some counties receiving inaccurate ballots.
Now many hope the new system could change all that. The Georgia Registered Voter Information System (GARViS) can store and secure a significant amount of data to meet the current moment and any future growth in voter records, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told GovTech.
“Knowing that our election management software will grow with us over time is really important,” Raffensperger said. “What we're finding already with GARViS is that we just get faster turnaround. Results will be uploaded quicker … . [eNet] just wasn't something that was being updated as regularly as we needed.”
The system stores and handles updates to voter registration records, processes absentee ballot information and verifies early voters.
Fulton County began using GARViS on Feb. 6, and the state continues to make small system tweaks and bring more functionalities online, county election officials said in February and March public meetings.
Several county officials expect the new system could help efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls and prevent errors, but first they need residents to let them finish transitioning. That’s difficult under Georgia’s voter challenge law, which obligates election officials to prioritize submitted challenges — which can be thousands at a time — over other goals, said Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections members during a March 16 public meeting.
PRIORITY ORDERED
Georgia law allows residents to challenge others’ eligibility to vote or register to vote. They can challenge an unlimited number of voters, and the board must hold a hearing within 10 business days of receiving the challenge.
“We have to respond within 10 days [even] when somebody sends us 5,000 names in one email,” said Nadine Williams, Fulton County's director of registration and elections.
When investigating challenges, the board has found no instances of someone voting illegally.
“We’re not finding that there’s a criminal situation going on here,” Board Chair Cathy Woolard said. “We’ve not found that people are voting illegally. We’ve found that we have a bit of a messy voter roll.”
Some challengers said they looked through voter rolls for anyone who might have moved out of state or appeared to have something potentially amiss with their listed addresses.
This has correctly identified some situations. For example, one person challenged 277 voters; when the board followed up on these, 10 of those individuals had indeed moved and responded by canceling their Georgia registrations, Registration Chief Shamira Marshall said.
But many challenges also appeared to be triggered by mistakes in how voter addresses were written.
One person said he'd issued challenges to flag errors, like a voter whose address was listed at No. 117 when it should've been 112.
Election officials are finding various incorrect address names. For example, the word “street” or “road” getting listed twice, changing a hypothetical “12 Crescent Street” to “12 Crescent Street Street.”
Marshall said some of those clerical errors were made by data entry clerks and are being corrected. In other cases, misspelled street names were “found in the transferring of the data [from eNet] into GARViS,” and Fulton was contacting the secretary of state about making corrections. The state handled transferring information between the systems.
Getting fully operational with GARViS might help resolve some of the issues that have prompted challenges in the first place.
For example, voters may not register using business addresses. A new partnership with a geographic information system (GIS) analysis company will help staff identify business addresses, and GARViS has features that can then prevent new voters from attempting to register at those locations, Williams said.
But getting these goals achieved is difficult when voters submit challenges. Unlike messaging board members to notify them of address typos to correct, issuing challenges triggers a legally mandated process, Board Member Aaron Johnson said.
Officials then must prioritize handling the challenges over tackling other objectives.
Woolard asked residents to stop submitting challenges for 90 to 120 days, to allow the board to focus on the transition, and to give time for GARViS' full effects to be felt. The county plans to bring in vendors to assist, and the Secretary of State’s Office still has work to do to make the system fully functional, she said.
“We're spending so much of our time and our resource doing your priority [investigating challenges] that we don't have time to do our priority in the way that we’d like to have it done,” Woolard said. "We don't have unlimited staff, we don't have unlimited time. And if we have to stop and investigate 5,000 voter challenges — or even 5,000 suggestions of fixes — those might be 5,000 things that we're not doing that would get us to a solution faster … We agree that there are things that need to be fixed, and we are focused on getting them fixed, and we finally have a tool from the Secretary of State's office that hopefully will align with all of our objectives.”
FROM eNET TO GARViS
Georgia has used eNet since 2013, but the system struggled in recent years.
A surge in early voting in 2020 left eNet running at about 80 percent of its usual speed, Fulton’s then-Elections Director Richard Barron told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That in turn led to long lines that may have deterred voting.
Failures to properly update eNet after 2021 redistricting also meant that, in 2022, some voters received ballots without the right candidate names, per Atlanta Civic Circle.
“[eNet] crashed entirely the first day of early voting for the 2020 election … . It went down twice during the 2022 primary on May 5 and May 16,” Zoe Chernicoff, director of research and policy at Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based voter rights and fair elections advocacy group, told GovTech.
When that happens, election workers often must revert to paper poll books to check in voters, creating a slower process.
“It tends to create backlog,” Chernicoff said. “Voters have to wait in line. People get confused about what's happening. Election workers get overwhelmed.”
eNet was “hardcoded, so to change minor things, it became a major issue both in time and also in financial resources,“ Raffensperger said.
The new system is expected to update more easily and quickly, and will secure data in the cloud, on FedRAMP-authorized servers. Georgia has more than 7.5 million active voters, and GARViS must store more than 100 million voter history records, Raffensperger said.
Many are hopeful GARViS will be an improvement.
“We are certainly in favor of a new system that serves voters better, reduces lines, allows election administrators to do their work," Chernicoff said. “And [we] are hopeful GARViS will prove — once it is fully implemented — to be that … We are still waiting to see if that is the case.”
Fulton County’s experience testing and adopting GARViS “has been passable, even [given] the newness of the system” Williams told GovTech. She expressed hopefulness during the March meeting saying, “We’re very confident that the GARViS system will help maintain the rolls better.”
