Technical Report

The November 2000 Presidential election awakened the world and raised significant concerns about the reliability and integrity of the election system in the United States. Vote counting, re-counting and other tremendous confusions in the Florida election system begged for a change in our voting process. It became crystal clear that the time had come to embrace the new inventions and technologies in our election process. The VoteFromAnywhere™ (VFA) system has successfully solved major issues in our current voting system. It allows voters to vote at their own convenience and from the privacy of homes, offices, airports, hospitals and even from out of country while they are serving in military or residing in overseas. This system brings the voting/polling booth at voters' fingertips by allowing them to vote through the World Wide Web using a PC (personal computer), laptop, mobile phone or handheld device.

The goal of the VoteFromAnywhere™ system is to improve the current voting process by emphasizing the following actions:

• eliminate all possible human errors/confusions,
• provide equal access/opportunity to all voters to vote,
• reduce election cost,
• abide by US election laws and
• build a simple and an "easy to use" system for all our citizens without compromising the privacy and security requirements identified by current election process.
• introduce this new system to voters by incremental steps and do not change the existing system until complete confidence is received from voters and election officials.

The long term goal of this system is to make the entire election process work seamlessly by integrating all aspects of election related activities (e.g., Voter Registration, Ballot Configuration, Absentee and Military Voting System Management, Conducting Polling, Tabulation, Results Integration and Reporting) under one system. However, it is worth mentioning that the VFA system is not the replacement for the current voting process or mechanism (e.g., voting machines at the booth, etc.). It is just an addition to our current system and it is absolutely dependent upon the election officials to decide whether to discontinue the current voting machines or not. This is not our decision.

System Description

The VoteFromAnywhere™ system is built based on US election rules and regulations. It will analyze the type of election (e.g., Mayoral, Congressional, Presidential etc.) and the laws of the participating state to conduct the right election process. Voters must be connected to the World Wide Web via laptop, mobile phone or handheld device. After selecting the right state and election type, the system will collect a voter's identification records to verify his/her identity and legitimacy for avoiding fraudulent votes. All IDs will be verified against the master database stored in the server that is administered by the state, county, or other Government certified authority. After ID verification is completed,the voter's record will be locked temporarily to acknowledge that the voting is "in progress" which will prevent duplicate voting. Later, the appropriate ballot will be displayed for candidate(s) selection(s).

The VoteFromAnywhere™ system will be intelligent enough to guide through the voters to cast their votes correctly by avoiding confusions and eliminating all possible human errors. This feature itself will reduce the number of "rejected votes" significantly. After a voter completes the voting process, his/her record will be updated, and it will be marked as "voted" to prevent multi-voting by a single voter. An automated timeout or session ending mechanism will be provided for privacy and data security. The automated event logging will be done for error detection and tracking purposes. The VoteFromAnywhere™ system will continuously update the voting records and will provide the final reports of the voting scores to appropriate people at appropriate time identified by the election authorities.

Technology

The VoteFromAnywhere™ is a cloud based enterprise application that can be accessed via web as well as mobile devices (e.g., phones, tablets and iPads). The security, integrity and privacy are the major concerns to any computerized voting system, which will be resolved by VoteFromAnywhere™ system. . This system will be developed based on cutting-edge technology in order to provide most secure and private voting system to our voters. All voters' personal records and election data will be encrypted before sending it over the Internet protocol. Special encryption algorithm will be used to protect the privacy and security of the system. All data will be duplicated and saved in a redundant/fault tolerant machine to recover from major crashes or catastrophes.

Pros and Cons

Pros:The VoteFromAnywhere™ system offers the following benefits to our voters and the election officials:

Increases Number of Voters Significantly by :
• Providing the uniform accessibility to all voters.
• Encouraging young people to vote by providing the cyber access.
• Providing freedom to disabled and sick people to vote without travelling.
• Giving convenience to citizens to vote according to their own schedule.
• Eliminating the restrictions for voting media (polling station only) by providing multi-media capabilities (PC, laptop, mobile phone and handheld devices).
• Allowing voters to vote from their homes or offices or even from airport in-transit.
• Allowing citizens to vote remotely even from outside US (e.g., from overseas)
• Extending the voting period by providing the "early voting & delayed counting" mechanism. It allows the voter to vote early but the actual counting does not start until the official vote counting day arrives.
• Provides better mechanism to Government officials to create ballots
• It saves money in printing and mailing ballots to overseas voters
• It improves the election system for our overseas citizens and soldiers by receiving their ballots instantly and by eliminating the delay due to mailing ballots.
• It eliminates the cost of storing and maintaining voting machines.
• Allows election officials to manage the election process efficiently.
• Increases voters' participation in numerous types of elections and surveys.
• Makes voting system more accurate by offering a simple and an user friendly process
• Eliminates confusion by providing appropriate guidance to the voters
• Above all, it eliminates the entire "Chad Family" (i.e., Chad, or Dimple Chad or Hanging Chad) by offering simple and easy to follow on-line directions.

Cons:The major concerns of the internet voting system are the possibilities of "Virus Attacks" and lack of privacy as well as security. Moreover, the security,integrity and secrecy of the Internet ballots transfer over cyber space must be done very carefully.

Implementation Plan

Since Internet voting will be a major change to our current voting process, we need to introduce the VoteFromAnywhere system to our citizens through multiple phases so that it does not create a sudden panic among voters and election officials. The implementation will be done at least in two or three phases.

The Phase-1 implementation might be more effective if we can conduct our first trial during Early Voting or Absentee Voting periods for our citizens. The system will verify voter's identity against the centralized on-line database and will allow the voter to vote over Internet using electronic ballots. After the voter casts his/her ballot, the data will be stored in the centralized database, and it will be ready for tabulation. No manual tabulation will be required, which will make our election officials' life easier.

Phase-2, After we gain our voters' as well as election officials' confidence, and resolve some of the difficult as well as controversial issues like voter ID verification, we will be able to conduct the end-to-end election process over the Internet very soon. In Phase-2, the VFA system will be exercised on the actual voting day by allowing voters to vote via laptops, mobile phones/devices or even kiosks connected to Internet at the voting booth under close supervision of election officials.

Conclusion

Despite all the difficulties that we are anticipating today, it will be worthwhile in taking a risk and introducing the Internet voting to our citizens for betterment. The fear of possible "Virus attacks", or technological threats to the electronic ballots should not stop our desire to solve the current crisis. Instead, we should encourage new innovations and challenge our technical communities to solve current problems that are preventing us from making the revolutionary changes in our election process. If we take a risk and introduce the values of VoteFromAnywhere™ to our citizens and election officials, they will like it and it will gain its momentum quickly.

Even though the VoteFromAnywhere™ system may not be able to perform all the election duties now, it is robust enough to execute most of the election activities that are required to conduct a nationwide election. Moreover, we all know that our current election system is not flawless, and it has its own limitations. Besides that, we also know that major enterprises (e.g., Bank, IRS, Medical, Insurance and Telecommunication companies) are conducting their important businesses over Internet using currently available technologies in the market. Therefore, we strongly believe that it is about time to introduce the Internet voting system to our citizens in order to increase their participation in democratic elections and to support The Help America Vote Act (HR 3295) for better voting system.