Elections board prepares to revamp R.I.'s aging campaign finance software. It just needs the money.

Yahoo

27-05-2025

The State of Rhode Island debuted its first electronic campaign finance system in 2002. It's been using the same software ever since. (Photo by Janine L. Weisman/Rhode Island Current)
Twenty-three years is young for a person. But for a software system, it's ancient.
That's why Rhode Island election administrators are pushing to rejuvenate the technology used to collect and share information about campaign finance donations and spending.
But the makeover to the Rhode Island Board of Elections' Electronic Reporting and Tracking System — colloquially referred to as 'ERTS' — requires extra money from state lawmakers already fretting over the many demands pulling at the state's purse strings. And how to store the last 23 years of reports from 1,300 candidates and committees in a way that people can still access and search remains in question.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The span between the 2024 presidential election and the 2026 state and local races offers the largest window to upgrade software and train users. If not now, the state would have to wait till 2029.
A three-year delay increases the risk of the collapse of the entire system, said Miguel Nunez, Rhode Island Board of Elections executive director. It also would mean another three years of spending — $70,000 in fiscal 2026 alone —- on an outdated system vulnerable to security threats.
'At this point, I find it a priority to try and enhance the system because it is so old at this point,' Nunez said in an interview Wednesday. 'It is essentially just being, year-to-year, maintained, with no enhancements, no improvements.'
A work order submitted by the board's existing vendor, Civix, could launch the long-awaited upgrade in July and be ready in time for the 2026 state election cycle. The shift to ERTS 2.0 offers better security and a more user-friendly interface for candidates and the public, and complies with updated state reporting requirements, Nunez told the board at its May 16 meeting.
The elections panel postponed a vote authorizing the contract until its June 3 meeting, to give Nunez time to make the case for the $140,000 in fiscal 2026 funding needed for the upgrades. The first-year expense includes the license and costs for Civix to provide training and troubleshooting, according to the proposed work order by the company, based outside of New Orleans. The elections panel in its fiscal 2026 funding request to the state sought $250,000 for software upgrades. But the request did not make it into Gov. Dan McKee's $14 billion spending proposal unveiled in January.
Nunez on Wednesday had yet to talk to McKee or legislative leaders but said he planned to 'in the coming days.'
McKee's office did not immediately respond to inquiries for comment Thursday.
And the final authority on the state's annual final tax-and-spend plan, House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi, remains noncommittal.
'This is just one in a continuously growing number of asks in an extremely challenging budget year,' Shekarchi, a Warwick Democrat said in an email Thursday. 'We are reviewing all the requests.'
The $140,000 first-year cost to upgrade campaign finance software is nearly twice the $69,492 needed for Civix provide service on the legacy campaign finance system, according to cost estimates Nunez presented to the elections panel.
Under Civix's proposal, the state would pay nearly $815,000 over five years for the upgrades and continued service. By comparison, it would cost $377,000 over the next five years to maintain the existing system, which includes a 5% increase in the year-to-year contract with Civix.
'We shouldn't be running 20-year-old systems,' Randy Jackvony, an elections board member who works in IT, said in an interview. 'I've seen other cases with other vendors where when something is way past the end-of-life, the price can jack up incredibly high because they just don't have the resources to address technical issues.'
Ric Thornton, state campaign finance director, suspects Rhode Island is the lone state still using Civix's legacy system. Meanwhile, four other jurisdictions — the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania and the cities of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Aurora, Colorado, already use the upgraded software administered by Civix, Thornton said in an interview.
Many of the Civix engineers who developed and know how to troubleshoot the legacy software are nearing retirement age, or have already retired, Nunez said.
Civix declined to comment on its services or staff, referring questions back to the Rhode Island elections board.
'If the system goes down and no one can fix it, we might be looking at reverting to paper filings, which is in violation of state law,' Nunez told the board during its May 16 meeting. 'And it could not be conducive to efficiency and transparency.'
Since 2002, Rhode Island has required candidates and committees raising or spending more than $10,000 a year, or maintaining a minimum $25,000 account balance, to report quarterly campaign finance activities electronically through its software platform. Candidates and committees not subject to the criteria often opt to use the software to submit their financial reports anyway. Just 15% of finance reports are sent in by email or pen and paper form, Nunez said.
Electronic reporting could be even higher if the state's software was able to accept specialized reports. A 2012 state law passed two years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision requires political action committees to disclose all independent donors and campaign expenses, including on advertising. But the existing ERTS system can't accept such reports, forcing roughly 75 applicable super PACs to file 200 reports each year by email or through a document upload service, Nunez said.
If the system goes down and no one can fix it, we might be looking at reverting to paper filings, which is in violation of state law.
– Miguel Nunez, executive director for the Rhode Island Board of Elections
Another law which took effect in 2024 requires vendors awarded state contracts worth $5,000 or more to file affidavits with the elections board detailing political contributions. But the existing software offers no way to track submissions from vendors affirming they don't make any contributions — their submissions are 'simply not logged,' Nunez said.
Upgrading ERTS also provides much-needed security enhancements, including multi-factor authentication, for candidates and committees that submit reports. Under the existing system, if a user forgets their password, only the state elections staff can reset it — posing potential access problems during critical reporting deadlines if the password snafu happens on a weekend and a staffer doesn't respond right away, Nunez said.
The existing system also leaves the door open to hackers who could, potentially, manipulate the campaign numbers being submitted, said Ken Block, a software engineer who owns Warwick-based data mining company Simpatico Software Systems. Block, who founded the Rhode Island Moderate Party and ran unsuccessfully as an independent gubernatorial candidate in 2014, saw an urgent need for the upgrade.
'Twenty years is a pretty long time in the software world,' Block said. 'It's not unreasonable that the board would find themselves needing to go out and procure a new one.'
The elections board asked Civix, its software vendor since 2002, to propose a better system instead of seeking competing proposals for new software. Nunez cited the short time window to complete the upgrade, as well as the highly specialized nature of the service, as reasons why.
'It's not a whole new purchase, it's a modest upgrade to a newer platform,' Nunez said.
Jackvony wasn't bothered by the lack of a formal request for proposals.
'If you've got a good relationship with a vendor, and feel confident, that's not out of place,' Jackvony said. 'It is somewhat common in IT, at least the private sector.'
Jackvony also said the price Civix quoted seemed reasonable, with hourly rates lower than those he vetted for his day job as chief information officer for Rhode Island Medical Imaging. He said his back-and-forth with the vendor on technical details of its proposal further boosted his confidence in them.
'They were incredibly responsive and detailed,' Jackvony said.
One wrinkle still not totally ironed out: What happens to the last 23 years of campaign reports?
Civix's proposal calls for archiving pre-2023 data as 'static read-only' PDFs — meaning not searchable or incorporated into the more modern data interface. Nunez said in an interview that the staff was working with Civix on how to make the PDFs searchable, though he acknowledged they would not be able to be aggregated with the new system data.
'That's crap,' said Block. 'I don't understand why they can't move all the data into the new system. They should be able to do that no problem.'
Nunez explained it would be too time consuming and expensive to ask Civix to transfer all existing campaign finance data into the new software. However, he acknowledged he never asked the company what it could cost.
John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, shared serious concerns about losing public access to historic campaign finance data under the transition to better software.
'It doesn't appear the board is focused on an important part of transparency, which is access to historic data,' he said. 'Members of the public, and especially members of the media, often need access to older data in order to make comparisons to what is happening now.'
Marion continued, 'It's good the old data will be there but it remains to be seen how easy it will be to access.'
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