Lingering questions about security and reliability could mean electronic voting is still not ready for the national spotlight.
Still, one company is taking its technology out on the road in preparation for the big time. Comfidex Corp. of New York is letting private organizations and universities put its VoteFiler system through its paces in nongovernmental elections before going into public polling places. Not only does the private sector offer a large potential market, “it will be an important part of our process for breaking into the government market,” said Comfidex chief technology officer John Philpit.
“By opening ourselves up now, it is our hope that by the time we actually run a public election with our software, John and I won’t have to disappear for three months,” said president Bill Stratigos.
VoteFiler is a hybrid system that lets voters create ballots online in advance of an election and cast the paper ballots at the polling place on election day. The goal is to give the efficiency of electronic vote tabulation with the security of a paper ballot that can be used for verification and recounting.
“We don’t let people vote at home,” Stratigos said. “We let people create ballots at home” so that they do not have to do that job at the polls.
VoteFiler software is used to put up a Web site where ballot selections can be made. Once a precinct’s ballot has been finalized, voters can visit the site to make choices and print out the finished ballot.
The selections are stored in a database and tied to a unique bar code on the paper ballot. On election day, the bar code is scanned at the polling place. If the bar code has not yet been used and it matches identifiers in the database, the ballot is accepted and the voter’s selections are moved into a vote database where they can be counted.
If the ballot is not accepted for any reason, the voter can vote using traditional machines in the polling place. A voter can also change their selections and print out a new ballot at any time prior to the election, because no vote is cast until the bar code is scanned and accepted at the poll.
Votes are tallied from the votes database, and in case of a recount, the paper ballots are available for optical scanning or a manual recount.
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