Today, the Center for Election Confidence (“CEC”) submitted a Response to a recent Request for Information issued by the North Carolina Office of State Auditor (“OSA”) and State Board of Elections (“NCSBE”) concerning potential upgrades to North Carolina’s statewide election management system, which handles key election administration tasks, such as voter registration, reporting of results, staff scheduling, and others.

CEC argues in its Response that transparency in all aspects of election administration and information—to the extent permitted by law—should be the guiding principle as North Carolina considers upgrades to its statewide election management system. This consideration process offers the rare opportunity for North Carolina to improve vital back-office functions that will have an outsized impact on voters’ confidence in and the integrity of North Carolina elections. Indeed, to the extent feasible, a new election management and information system could virtually eliminate the need for costly and contentious requests for election information deemed public by state and federal laws. 

As part of this transparency push, CEC recommends comprehensive public reporting capabilities detailing voter check-ins and ballots returned, cast, adjudicated, and rejected or accepted, registration reports showing total registrants, pending registrations, and removed registrations, and vote record reports tracking each voter’s ballot requests and voting method.

CEC similarly emphasizes transparency through input/output auditability-by-design systems, election timeline tracking showing real-time status updates for both individual ballots and the election process itself, and errata reports documenting corrections to election records.

In order to achieve this increased transparency in a secure manner, CEC recommends that North Carolina implement zero-trust security principles, secure, private networking for electronic poll books, non-Internet-connected, air-gapped systems for all voting equipment, regular and complete electronic backups in an immediately accessible medium, and maintenance of paper backups for election-critical information like poll books.

To further support these reforms, CEC also urges enhanced continuity of operations planning for cloud provider outages, including consideration of on-premises, hot-swappable backup systems, disaster recovery procedures for natural disasters like Hurricane Helene, and the deployment of asynchronous operation capabilities for areas with limited connectivity.

CEC commends NCSBE’s and OSA’s commitment to an open process and encourages the adoption of its suggested reforms.