Four years into the contract and $10 million spent, Oregon's Secretary of State confirmed the contract has a stop work status. JoeHoft.com reports the story in a Guest Post by Jessica Pollema, South Dakota Canvassing Group.

In early 2023, Joe Hoft published multiple articles raising serious questions about an election software used in at least 35 states called TotalVote. TotalVote is an all-inclusive software which handles almost all aspects of an election including campaign finance reporting, voter registration, processing election results, and election night reporting. TotalVote was developed by a company called BPro, from Pierre, South Dakota, which was purchased by KNOWiNK in 2020. TotalVote is centralized and hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud – raising questions about cybersecurity, and TotalVote is uncertified, yet is handling parts of the election that must be performed on certified software.

BPro/KNOWiNK software has been proven to have allowed backdated voter registrations in Hawaii, unnatural injections of voter registrations in every county in New Mexico, and the KNOWiNK claims in its product information that election workers can override election results.”

June 3, Pollema brings these articles back in focus. She writes:

The story of TotalVote’s rise raises eyebrows about how centralized election software developed and spread across our nation. As we’ve covered in the past, former South Dakota Secretaries of State paved the way for BPro’s TotalVote system to land in states far and wide, reportedly gifting the source code but requiring convenient sole-source maintenance contracts that avoided competitive bidding.

States like Hawaii (2014), New Mexico (2015), Arizona (2017), Washington (2018), and Pennsylvania (2020) all signed on with BPro for TotalVote; a system handling everything from voter registration to election night reporting. In February 2021, after receiving a huge injection of capital from a private equity firm, St. Louis-based KNOWiNK swooped in, acquired BPro, and took over these contracts, adding 450 jurisdictions to its already massive network of 980 using its Electronic Poll Pad system. Not stopping there, KNOWiNK expanded its reach by snagging Oregon in 2021 for TotalVote’s election night reporting.

Pennsylvania and Oregon had each signed over $10 Million contracts with KNOWiNK for a customized version of the TotalVote System, which was to replace their archaic and unreliable voter roll and election night reporting systems. Each state also requires independent project management oversight for multimillion dollar contracts, and selected Gartner, Inc. for that oversight. Without the status reports and risk assessments from Gartner, we would not have internal documentation of the serious issues that KNOWiNK failed to resolve.

Missed deadlines, scrambled data, programming issues and cybersecurity failures are a few of the many factors causing a deteriorated relationship between the state and the vendor, resulting in the State of Pennsylvania terminating the contract with KNOWiNK, putting them years behind schedule and back at square one.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

In a recent check on the progress of Oregon’s version of KNOWiNK’s TotalVote System project dubbed ORVIS, it was discovered that the entire directory of ORVIS project documents posted on the Oregon Secretary of State’s website had been removed somewhere around the beginning of May. A phone call to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office revealed that a stop work order had been issued to KNOWiNK to halt all work on the ORVIS project, while state officials determine how to proceed. All previously posted Gartner and Executive Steering Committee reports tracking progress of the project have been taken down and are not currently available online.

A Gartner oversight report dated October 2024 revealed the majority of project status benchmarks in the “red zone” or high risk category, two years behind schedule, over budget, again with KNOWiNK apparently not capable of meeting the terms of the contract.

A public records request for evidence of the stop work order did confirm that all work in Oregon has been halted. Millions of dollars have already been paid to KNOWiNK. Will the State of Oregon get their money back?

Read the entire article on how KNOWiNK has impacted other states.

The article also points to page 143 of the Oregon contract that mandates that the system "shall allow the County Elections Staff to override results, if necessary".


--Donna Bleiler

Post Date: 2025-06-05 05:35:03

Last Update: 2025-06-05 23:05:20