MACON, Ga. — It's new, and state election officials say it's improved.
GRVIS or the Georgia Registered Voter Information System is up and running.
Early last year Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the state would replace its voter registration system.
13WMAZ’s Jessica Cha spoke with an election official who says it should make your voting experience a little easier.
The Bibb County Board of Elections says the updated system does bring some new changes, however, for voters, they say things should look almost exactly the same except faster.
"The process easier for the voter is always a good thing,” Thomas Gillon said.
Gillon is Bibb's Interim Elections Supervisor. He says he was hired around the time the state introduced GRVIS.
"It allows the registrars and staff to maintain voter roles, to deal with any voter registrations, transfers from one county to another, any time someone registers to get a driver’s license,” he said.
Gillon says the previous system ELECTIONET was a decade old. He says GRVIS is similar, but more efficient and faster.
"Generally running reports, if we wanted to know how many voters were in a certain precinct, it could take some minutes, overnight,” Gillon said.
Now, it should take half that time. That should cut waiting times for voters too.
"With ELECTIONET, we had to use an additional system to check the voters in,” he said. “Doing both of those programs simultaneously took a little bit longer.”
Gillon says using those two systems could take up to three minutes to check one person in.
“Which, still isn’t bad, but when you have a line of voters– it adds up,” Gillon said.
Now, it'll be less than a minute.
"Oh yeah, I'm down with it,” Keith Owen said.
Owen voted last November. He says it wasn't too pleasant.
"There's probably 50 to 70 people in line and it was insane,” he said.
Owen says he waited almost 45 minutes to vote.
"It's like, man, I've got other things to do, like yard work, grocery shopping and here I am waiting in line to vote."
Owen says he can’t argue with shorter waits.
"It's more of a convenience than an inconvenience, you know,” Owen said.
Gillon also mentions it will not affect the process of registering to vote. He said that would still take about 30 days, and can be done online or in person.