Migrating New Jersey's Voter Registration System Off Oracle
Moving 24 Oracle instances onto a 13-site multi-master MariaDB topology that had to survive county-level network outages and keep elections running. Delivered three months ahead of a $12M contract. Still at 100% uptime through hundreds of election cycles.
A voter who shows up on election day and cannot be found in the rolls has no remedy later. That single constraint — every site must keep accepting writes during a network partition — drove every architectural decision in the rebuild of New Jersey’s statewide voter registration system.
The full write-up will cover:
- Why consensus-based replication (including Galera) was evaluated and rejected for this problem shape
- The 13-site multi-master topology: partial mesh design, conflict detection at the application layer, reconvergence behavior
- Oracle-to-MariaDB data migration at scale: type-system edge cases, quarantine pipelines, three-pass cutover
- The Windows-to-Linux conversion and training county staff who would run it at 2 AM on election night
- Twelve years of 100% uptime: what made the design durable
Full case study coming soon.