Okaloosa County FL Selects Democracy Live - Coordinates Voting Grant

A $1.6 million federal grant will allow Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux to make progress toward his goal of providing seamless Internet voting to overseas veterans.

The so-called Electronic Absentee Systems for Elections grant comes from the Department of Defense through its Federal Voting Assistance Program, according to a news release sent out last week.

Lux’s office was selected to administer the grant, which will provide funding to 12 counties and give elections officials the ability to serve overseas personnel stationed at 20 of the 21 military installations in Florida.

“We named the coalition ‘Our Mission: Your Vote’ to emphasize to those hardest-to-reach voters that we take their right to vote as seriously as they take their mission to defend our freedoms,” Lux said in the release.

Lux envisions a day when ballots cast on a war fighter’s computer a world away can be sent directly to a printer in his, or some other election supervisor’s, office ready to be scanned and documented.

And though the technology to do that is out there now, the will to make it work isn’t, Lux said.

This grant, which runs through 2016, will afford the supervisors who have opted into the grant plan the time to improve on a workable, but imperfect, overseas voting scheme, Lux said.

“The first year we’ll be using a system very similar to what we did in Okaloosa County last year,” Lux said.

For the 2012 election cycle, overseas voters will log into a special website to make their vote selections, then either mail or fax their ballot, Lux said.

“This is where we still have problems,” he said.

The obvious downside of this way of conducting the vote, Lux said, is that the ballot will be handled by people other than the voter before it is processed for tabulation.

Phase Two and Three here >