InfoSENTRY Statewide Voter Registration System Requirements Analysis and Needs Assessment

InfoSENTRY Photo of Oregon State Capitol dome with the gold Pioneer on top. Blue sky in the background and American Flag in the foreground. Oregon statewide voter registarion system.

InfoSENTRY Statewide Voter Registration System
Requirements Analysis and Needs Assessment

InfoSENTRY conducted a needs assessment and requirements analysis for a statewide voter registration system in Oregon in 1998 and 1999. The project is known officially as the Oregon Central Voter Registry (O C V R) system.

The requirements analysis took project team members into almost half the state's counties for focus groups, documentation collection, structured process walkthroughs, and site visits. InfoSENTRY’s research and analysis methodology followed guidelines recommended by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (I E E E) for collection and documentation of systems needs and requirements.

InfoSENTRY’s project team worked throughout the study with a statewide voter registration system Advisory Board, consisting of county election directors, state National Voter Registration Act agencies, political party representatives, and a media participant. The Advisory Board met throughout the project, receiving monthly reports from InfoSENTRY about the project’s status and challenges. The Advisory Board achieved a general consensus about the statewide voter registration system’s basic requirements and architecture.

InfoSENTRY’s report contained analyses of statewide voter registration system efforts in other states and an analysis of the unique requirements associated with Oregon’s recently adopted vote-by-mail elections, absentee voter management, poll worker management, petition signature checking, and electronic document management. The report contained configuration overviews for five alternative development approaches, an order-of-magnitude budget estimate for the alternatives, and risk assessments for each of the alternatives. InfoSENTRY factored each alternative's level of risk into the budget estimates, providing an assessment of risk/cost ratio for each alternative.

Following several attempts by the Secretary of State’s Office and the county association of election officials to obtain state legislative funding for the system, Oregon subsequently used the requirements analysis as a foundation for development of the statewide voter registration system mandated by the Help America Vote Act.

InfoSENTRY subsequently worked on the procurement team to draft the R F P and review vendor proposals for what has become one of the nation’s premier implementations of a statewide voter registration system. InfoSENTRY also served as the quality auditor for the O C V R implementation project.