Background
- Federal and state law requires electronic ballot transmission for certain groups of voters. (Military, overseas, voters with disabilities).
- A majority of jurisdictions in CA comply with State mandated electronic ballot transmission laws by receiving ballots via outdated fax machines, or insecure email attachments.
- Most recent academic reports agree that transmitting digital ballots via a secure, federally approved cloud is more secure than fax machines and email attachments.*
The Problem
- Millions of voters who cannot vote a conventional paper postal ballot due to disabilities, or geography are often disenfranchised from voting privately and independently.
- Current electronic ballot return law is outdated, requiring the use of fax machines.
One Solution – accessible, remote ballot printing
- Democracy Live has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS), to deploy a cloud-based, remote ballot printing solution that enables blind, disabled, military, overseas and other eligible voters to access, mark and return a secure digital ballot, which gets printed at the elections office.
- This remote ballot printing system is not capable of tabulation. Similar to fax and email, the portal electronically transmits the ballot, which is then printed and processed by the election’s administrator.
- Secured in the same federally approved cloud infrastructure as the CIA, FBI, DHS – recently selected by the NSA.
Proven
The remote ballot printing portal has been deployed in over 4,000 elections, across 31 states since 2008, with zero compromises.
