No one should be shocked that Pennsylvania’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system went down for about 90 minutes Thursday morning. The computer system on which most voting activities in the state hinge is a mess, and the state has known this for years.
Speaking on “The Dom Giordano Show” on Philadelphia’s WPHT talk radio, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt described the SURE system as a voter registration database that county boards of elections interface with “all day long.”
When voters register, request a ballot, are sent a ballot, or vote, every move is marked in the Sure System. More than 9 million Pennsylvania residents, every person registered to vote, have data in the SURE System.
“We had an outage for about 90 minutes that prevented many counties from connecting to it earlier this morning, but has been back up for a while now,” Schmidt said. “It was like 9:45 to 11:15 this morning. Voters who applied to vote by mail, whether it’s in person or whatever else, could still do so. It didn’t prevent any of that.”
The SURE System has had problems for a long time.
As I reported for The Epoch Times, in December 2019, Pennsylvania’s then-Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (who is now running for attorney general) wrote a scathing, 192-page report that found “internal control weaknesses in the SURE System related to input and maintenance of voter records. The audit revealed examples of potential inaccuracies, which the report said should be sent to
