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Gartner Advises County Governments: Election Technology for 2004 Is a Small Investment With Big Returns
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STAMFORD, CONN., November 15, 2000 — To reduce election complications and discrepancies, Gartner Group, Inc. (NYSE: IT and ITB) recommends that local governments follow the lead of counties in Arizona and explore e-voting — the use of information technology to improve the voting process — as an option for voters. In the 2000 Arizona Democratic primary, about half of the 87,000 voters completed their ballots electronically, either from their homes or their polling places.
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In national elections, voting is managed locally by more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. Most counties determine which systems they each use resulting in a dizzying array of machines, methods and practices across the U.S.
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“There is an overwhelming need for more efficient ballot tallying and for clearer voting practices,” said Christopher Baum, Vice President, Electronic Government, for Gartner. “E-voting could address both of those issues and also provide a quick and easy way to recount the votes if necessary. If e-voting had been used in the recent presidential election, we’d undoubtedly know the winner by now.”
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Gartner provides the following advice and explains the benefits regarding e-voting:
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- Presidential and local elections should be supplemented with Internet voting options available at voters’ homes and at public polling places.
- To cast votes, voters would log into a virtual private network via their specific PIN numbers or some other secure method.
- As votes are cast, they would simultaneously be transmitted to the tally point and recorded on local, permanent storage, such as a WORM (write once, read many) drive. The permanent storage device would be locked in a "ballot box" to prevent tampering and would be the "hard copy" backup used if a recount became necessary.
- Voters' participation would be recorded separately from the actual ballot, providing verification that a voter did not vote more than once, while protecting the secret ballot.
- Voter participation would likely increase as the flexibility in casting votes became more widely available.
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