The Beginning of the End for KNOWiNK: Oregon Dumps KNOWiNK TotalVote System Four Years Into Contract
Guest post by Jessica Pollema
Back in January 2024, an article dropped exposing critical deficiencies found in KNOWiNK TotalVote software. Originally posted on JoeHoft.com, “Can any states using KNOWiNK software applications be confident in safe and secure elections?”, the article raised serious red flags about KNOWiNK’s election software. As of today, these problems do not appear to be resolved, but are ongoing or even getting worse, causing the state of Oregon to issue a stop work order on their contract with KNOWiNK.
“In early 2023, multiple articles were published 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.”
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.
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?
South Dakota is set to spend $4.5 Million with KNOWiNK for upgrades to the original TotalVote system; a program that was developed by the state and funded with South Dakota tax dollars, that was then assumed by a private, for-profit corporation called Bpro at the time. South Dakota has been paying this private corporation to host and maintain TotalVote, despite all government documents declaring the state of South Dakota owned the source code. The entire story of the inception of TotalVote and it’s roll in the 2020 election was detailed in this September 2023 article found here: https://joehoft.com/shocking-exclusive-bpro-KNOWiNKs-uncertified-internet-connected-cloud-based-election-systems-are-foreign-influenced-and-used-to-illegally-process-election-results/.
The South Dakota statewide TotalVote system crashed on November 1, 2024, causing early voting chaos while Nevada also experienced “glitches” in data transfers. South Dakota Deputy Secretary of State Tom Deadrick blamed the outage on a “global outage” of the Microsoft Azure platform, but Microsoft did not appear to report any global outages on November 1, 2024. Nevada’s TotalVote program, called VREMS, cost the state $30 million, yet election officials reported experiencing an array of issues.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose ordered several county boards of elections to revert to using paper pollbooks instead of electronic ones, following a discovery of a security issue in Perry County. “The issue originated in Perry County, east of Columbus, where the elections board director reported a problem with the machines but did not provide further details, referring inquiries to the Secretary of State’s office. Frank LaRose’s office confirmed the security concern but did not specify which counties are affected or the number of counties using paper pollbooks.”
On May 8th, 2025, South Dakota Secretary of State Monae Johnson was questioned by the Government Oversight and Audit Committee about the $4.5 Million KNOWiNK contract. Representative and House Pro Tempore Karla Lems and Senator Taffy Howard pressed Johnson regarding tax dollars paid to KNOWiNK for the use of a program that rightfully belongs to the state. Questions were raised regarding cybersecurity protocols, contract provisions and proper oversight. State election director Rachel Soulek admitted in testimony that no one in South Dakota has any oversight of the programming or cybersecurity. We are blindly trusting out of state employees and subcontractors to deliver a quality product that meets the security standards necessary to protect national critical infrastructure.
Without an independent firm such as Gartner ensuring all aspects of the project are implemented properly, all features are working correctly, and the highest level of cybersecurity standards are applied, the people of South Dakota and other states running a hybrid version of the outdated TotalVote system can only assume the same issues that caused Oregon and Pennsylvania to cancel their contracts could be affecting it’s operation in our states too.
Citizens are lobbying the Government Oversight and Audit committee to terminate the contract with KNOWiNK, instead promoting a state built and maintained voter roll maintenance and election night reporting system, housed on state servers, run by people accountable to the citizens of South Dakota.
Over a year and a half after voicing concerns on Oregon and Pennsylvania, it is becoming very apparent that every state using KNOWiNK’s TotalVote system should be concerned and seriously consider an independent review of the program or termination of their contracts.
Is this the beginning of the end for KNOWiNK?
The post BREAKING HUGE: The Beginning of the End for KNOWiNK? Oregon Dumps KNOWiNK TotalVote System Four Years Into Contract first appeared on Joe Hoft.
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