The secretary of state has dumped the vendor responsible for publishing Arizona’s election results online after persistent problems on Election Day in 2012 and 2014. The state’s election website was slow, difficult to load and produced error messages during the 2012 primary and general elections. In 2014, former Secretary of State Ken Bennett and the election vendor SOE Software promised improvements, but the problems persisted with outages and errors that frustrated voters and candidates. Matt Roberts, spokesman for the secretary of state, said the contract was not renewed in March, because of SOE Software’s poor election-night performances, “communication issues,” and the system’s limited customization features.
“Specifically in those first 20 minutes (on election night), where it’s very important that we get it right and display results in those minutes, where everyone wants to see them, and there are issues with it, that’s a problem for us,” Roberts said. “We were pretty disappointed with our performance in those elections.”
In a statement, Bo O’Dea, vice president of marketing for the company that owns SOE, wrote: “After five years of working with the State of Arizona, SOE’s Election Night Reporting (ENR) contract will expire naturally. While ENR did experience slowdowns during the 2014 elections, since that time we addressed the core issue, invested heavily in architecture enhancements, hired an independent technology firm to test our changes and have successfully reported results for over 40 elections across the country.”
Full Article: Arizona dumps election vendor after repeated slowness.