Secretary of State outlines multi-system IT overhaul; Safe at Home portal launched, election system deferred to May

Secretary of State Sarah Copeland-Hanzas told the Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on Tuesday, March 11, in Montpelier that her office has completed a multi-year information-technology overhaul that includes a newly launched Safe at Home portal and updated business services, campaign finance and lobbying filing systems, while the election management system is still in end-user testing and is targeting a May 2025 launch.

The upgrades, Copeland-Hanzas said, aim to move services that historically relied on paper and aging software into modern, mobile-friendly online platforms intended to improve service for survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, businesses, campaign filers, lobbyists and voters across Vermont.

The Safe at Home address-confidentiality portal, designed to let eligible participants manage mail forwarding and other program functions online, “actually launched on February 20,” Copeland-Hanzas said. The office reported the implementation cost fell in line with the budget and said annual maintenance will be lower than prior arrangements. The office said about 201 participants (125 households) were ported into the new system and that roughly 60% of existing participants have logged into the portal since outreach began.

David Hall, director of business services at the Office of the Secretary of State, described the new business-services filing system as “mobile friendly” and said his five-person team (plus the director) has processed more than 44,000 filings so far this year. Hall said the office still accepts paper filings but built the new system to reflect statutory filing requirements more closely and to reduce manual workload. He said the new system reduces the office’s expected maintenance costs by about $110,000 per year compared with the previous system and that the vendor, Reframe Solutions, has allowed rapid, low-cost adjustments after launch.

On campaign finance and lobbying, elections staff said both systems moved from older software and were put into service in early January 2025. Elections Director Sean Schann said the campaign finance system launched Jan. 6 and had an implementation cost of roughly $360,000, with annual maintenance of about $20,000. The lobbying system launched in early January as well; officials said the contracted amount was $630,000, about $484,000 has been paid to date, and first-year maintenance is about $61,000. The lobbying system vendor was identified as Stonewall Solutions; the campaign finance and business-services vendor is Reframe Solutions.

The election management system — the largest of the office’s projects and the one used to operate the statewide checklist, absentee ballot tracking, online voter registration and the public results site — remains in testing. Staff said they conducted end-user testing in February with roughly 10 town and city clerks, have scheduled broader training in April, and are targeting a May 2025 launch to avoid interfering with Town Meeting Day workloads.

On cybersecurity and breach response, staff cited state law (the state consumer breach notice requirements) as the governing timeline for notifying affected Vermonters and the attorney general’s office. Copeland-Hanzas and vendors said the new platforms are cloud-hosted, behind a web application firewall and subject to continuous monitoring and penetration testing; they also noted the Agency of Digital Services (ADS) provided project management and security review during contracting.

Copeland-Hanzas said the office used a mix of funding to complete the simultaneous projects: federal funding supported the elections work and business-services revenue (excess receipts) covered other costs that otherwise would have been swept to the general fund. She raised the need for a dedicated IT capital fund and said creating such a reserve would require legislative authority; she has discussed the idea with the committee chair and the Joint Fiscal Office.

The presentations included questions from committee members about vendor selection timelines, account migration, mobile usability, duplicate records in migrated data, and how the Department of Motor Vehicles interface for automatic voter registration will be coordinated. Officials said they did not migrate user profiles for security reasons, which raised short-term call volume as users created new accounts; much of the heavy support burden occurs in the first quarter of the filing year.

Discussion points, in staff and committee members’ words, included: - Security and breach notification procedures governed by Vermont law, with required follow-up notices to the attorney general’s office; David Hall noted the state’s consumer breach notice provisions apply to these systems. - A desire to reduce statutory friction where multiple entity-specific rules create unnecessary account or filing steps; staff said they are proposing statutory cleanups (including a referenced bill, H.243) so the online workflows can be simpler. - The election system’s dependency on an updated Department of Motor Vehicles system and the advisability of scheduling the launch after Town Meeting Day and clerk turnover to permit training.

The office cited measurable early impacts: about 60% of Safe at Home participants have logged in; business services handled roughly 44,000 filings in the first 2.5 months of the year; campaign finance and lobbying systems each have been used by hundreds of filers (staff noted 500 registered lobbyists and 622 employers in the new lobbying system). Staff emphasized that vendors have been responsive to post-launch fixes and that staggered contract expiration dates should avoid a future single-point replacement crisis.

Copeland-Hanzas closed by urging the committee to consider a mechanism to preserve excess business-services receipts as a capital reserve so future secretaries are not forced to replace major IT systems without a funding source. “The only reason we were able to do all of these IT systems at the same time is because we had federal funding to help us with the elections system and because we had a little bit of excess receipts,” she said.

Short-term next steps listed by staff include continuing vendor bug fixes and small feature rollouts, completing end-user testing and training for the election system, and continuing discussions with the Joint Fiscal Office and the legislature on capital-fund options.