County approves low‑cost cloud tenancy to preserve historical voter records after VOTEC contract ended

Cameron County approved a monthly cloud tenancy and contracted work on Oct. 7 to maintain access to historical voter registration data and images after the county’s contract with its previous vendor, VOTEC, ended Oct. 1.

Elections staff said they are fully live on their new Team system and are manually entering records that did not transfer automatically, but maintaining searchable access to historical images and vote history remains important. Remy, representing the county elections office, said Next Election Services will develop a lookup program and the county will establish a tenancy on Oracle Cloud to host the data.

Remy said the monthly hosting costs will be approximately $25 for storage and about $155 to run the database — roughly $200 per month, or $2,400 annually — and staff estimated a year of use while the county moves data to its virtual servers. Commissioners approved the request; Commissioner Joey Lopez made the motion, Commissioner Benavides seconded and the motion carried.

Elections staff said they previously considered a short‑term vendor agreement with VOTEC but that a prior estimate of $2,000 per month proved unnecessary once the Next Election Services/Oracle tenancy solution was developed.