California Secretary of State

Contact:
California Secretary of State's Office
1500 11th Street
Sacramento, California 95814
www.ss.ca.gov

Tools Used:
CORBAŽ, Sun's ORB from Java 2

Description:
The Secretary of State was one of seven constitutional officers designated in California's first State Constitution of 1849. In the beginning, the office was appointive and it remained so until 1863. Early duties of the office included the maintenance of state records, providing legislators with ink and stationery, and licensing vehicles. As state government grew in response to population growth and added new dimensions and responsibilities, so did the office of the Secretary of State. Having gained responsibility for overseeing elections and chartering corporations, to name but a few added duties over the years, the office has increasingly become the focus of much attention.

Problem: 
In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), also known as "Motor Voter." The purpose of NVRA is to make voter registration as simple and convenient as possible for all eligible voters, allowing citizens to register simultaneously with obtaining a driver's license, applying for social welfare or rehabilitation services, or entering the armed services.  The NVRA requires each state to designate as voter registration agencies all offices of state-funded programs primarily engaged in providing these services. This act offers all Americans the opportunity to register to vote at a variety of locations.  

California elections administrators were concerned that, due to the state's large population and multiple registration opportunities, the NVRA would result in a large number of duplicate voter registrations in their systems that would significantly increase costs to state and local jurisdictions, and the opportunities for voter fraud.  At the time, California did not a have a statewide voter file. They relied on voter registration tapes, supplied by the county elections officials at specifically mandated dates, then read on the state data center's mainframe system to perform statewide duplicate checks, a time-consuming and cumbersome process.  

California also relied on the state data center's mainframe system for candidate filing and elections reporting functions.  Each new election required that the system be rebuilt to reflect the appropriate contests and ballot measures, a task that required approximately four thousand employee hours.  After each election, the candidate information and vote totals were deleted from the system and maintained as paper record.  The legacy mainframe system also did not afford the type of access to candidate and vote result information to allow creation of the various types of reports requested by staff, media, and the public; nor did it allow county officials to report candidate information electronically to the Secretary of State.   In 1995, the Legislature passed a bill that mandated the Secretary of State's offices to create a statewide voter registration database and election management system. 

The California Secretary of State (SOS) completed development of the statewide voter registration database with duplicate checking capabilities in the summer of 1998 as part of the CALVOTER I program.  In the fall of 1998, the election management project (CALVOTER II) was started with the requirement that it be competed in time for the March 2000 presidential primary election in California. An eight-person development team from Natoma Technologies, Inc. implemented a CORBA®-based extranet, linking all 58 counties in California for candidate filing and election reporting transactions over the SOSWAN.  CALVOTER II is a custom-developed application with integrated data validation, error checking for all California state level candidate filing and election reporting requirements. "CORBA provided the best middle-tier, open solution to integrate multiple county systems which enabled the needed security and facilitated transaction processing for the largest statewide voting system in the Country", said Wyatt Dietrich, Vice President-Operations of Natoma Technologies, Inc. 

Before the CALVOTER system was in place, there was limited electronic communication between the counties and the state -- candidate records filed with the county elections officials had to be sent to the state in order for them to be entered into the database; fewer than half of the state's 58 counties transmitted their vote total to the California Secretary of State electronically on election night (the remainder phoned or FAXed in their information). Implementation of the CORBA-based CALVOTER II applications has changed all that, providing for the first time direct electronic communication between the SOS and the counties for both these functions. "The Java front-end and CORBA middle-tier solution provides the flexibility for different county systems to share data via a common application programming interface (API)," according to Thomas Ramirez, Lead Java Developer for Natoma Technologies, Inc.  The records are a vital part of the election process and it is essential that they are easily accessible. It used to take the IT department 4-5 days just to get a list of candidates.  That report is an extreme priority because there are such strict guidelines enforced on ballot design and organization. 

Melissa Warren, project manager for the California SOS Elections Division said, "The best thing about the CALVOTER system is its flexibility. It will be easy to expand the system as we need to. New candidates, districts, parties, documents and the like can be easily added and old ones eliminated."  

The new system works with Seagate's Crystal Reports; any of the 25-30 reports that are run regularly can be produced within a day, sometimes within  minutes of the request.  It also allows these reports to be exported to a number of different formats, including HTML, Word and Excel.