The US state of Texas has taken its voter registration contract out of the hands of Big Blue over data security and disaster recoverability fears. (I guess they're still welcome in Florida. sub.ed.)

The state was involved in a $863 million data centre consolidation project being handled by IBM. However it became worried when a server being managed by IBM crashed resulting in a 13-day outage of the office's business records filing system.

A spokesman from the Secretary of State's office saying that the incident showed that IBM was useless when it came to recovering lost data. The state's Department of Information Resources, which is overseeing the IBM contract, gave permission for the agency to withdraw its election systems from the contract, the report said.

Following its withdrawal from the IBM project, the agency will set up its own data centre with two separate back-up locations. The project started in November 2004 and was supposed to have been completed by January 2006. Not only was it late but it appears to have been a complete waste of cash.

Under the contract, IBM was supposed to have helped Texas build a statewide voter registration system that would be complaint with Help America Vote Act standards.