Government Computer News
Overseas electronic voting pilot project announced
Overseas voters registered in Okaloosa County, Fla., will have a chance to try an electronic absentee voting system in next year’s general election, county election officials announced.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
The Okaloosa Distance Balloting Project will put a handful of kiosk computers, staffed by trained poll workers, at locations near U.S. military facilities in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan to enable as many as 900 voters to cast absentee ballots via a virtual private network.
The pilot, announced Dec. 5 in Washington, is the initial project of the Operation Bring Remote Access to Voters Overseas (BRAVO) Foundation, whose goal is to establish reliable electronic alternatives to paper-and-mail absentee voting for Americans overseas in time for the 2016 presidential election.
Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Pat Hollarn, who started the program, said she was frustrated with modest efforts in past election years to correct difficulties overseas voters have in receiving and casting ballots via mail. The county is home to a number of military bases, with 20,000 of the service members and families registered to vote in the county currently stationed overseas.
Pilot programs at the federal level that tried combinations of e-mailed and faxed ballots have not resulted in a working program, she said.
“We are approaching another presidential election without a secure, reliable overseas voting system,” Hollarn said, adding that she realized “this is not going to happen from the top down. It has to happen from the bottom up,” starting with local election officials.
The size of the overseas U.S. voting population is not known precisely, but estimates go as high as 7 million. Problems with receiving and casting absentee ballots have received increased attention in recent years because of the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. But voters -- both military and civilian -- have long experienced problems. As many as two-thirds of overseas voters who request ballots are not able to cast them in time to be counted in the election, according to some estimates.
The system selected for the program will use voting software from Scytl Secure Electronic Voting S.A., a Barcelona-based company that has developed secure remote voting systems for a number of foreign countries. On-site poll workers will authenticate remote voters’ identities, and people will cast votes directly to a secure server in Okaloosa County. No data will be stored on the remote kiosks.
![1105 Government Information Group [purity]](/images/1105logo_website.gif "Government Computer News [purity]")
© 1996-2008 1105 Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
