Michigan secretary of state defends new campaign finance portal amid migration problems and fixes

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told the Michigan House Committee on Oversight that the Michigan Transparency Network — the new, unified campaign-finance and lobbyist filing portal (referred to in testimony as "Mitten") — is being actively fixed after performance and data-migration problems during its rollout, and that the state and vendor are working under a corrective-action plan and a contract that includes service‑level credits.

Benson said the vendor, Tyler Technologies, will refund the state for downtime to date ("The current refund stands at $166,000," she said) and that the five‑year fixed‑fee contract totals $9,000,000. She contrasted that with the previous maintenance contract for the legacy system (MERTZ), which she said cost $18,000,000 over nine years, or about $1,800,000 annually; Benson said Mitten’s annualized cost is about $1,200,000.

The new portal aimed to combine decades of campaign finance, lobbyist and filing records into a modern, searchable database; Benson and staff said migrating roughly 24 million legacy records from MERTZ created unanticipated data‑normalization and search‑performance problems that contributed to the troubled launch. Benson said the department has prioritized user support and staged monthly…