LiveBallot Gets Overseas Votes to the Polls on Time
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 2:47PM The Florida 2012 Republican Primary is scheduled for Jan. 31, but Florida residents living and working overseas have had access to ballots since December via an online Web portal in the cloud.
To date, more than 1,200 Florida residents from 40 counties have used Democracy Live’s LiveBallot to get immediate access to their ballots. They have been able to fill out those ballots online or on paper and return them via mail or fax, depending on state election laws. LiveBallot is deployed and hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.
In the past, many overseas voters have not received an absentee ballot in time for it to be filled out, returned, and counted. Others have been relegated to only casting a ballot for federal elections and have not had the opportunity to vote on important state and local elections. LiveBallot gives voters unique identifying information to access their voter-specific ballot. Upon return, the signature on the ballot is matched with voter registration records to verify the voter's identity, according to officials from Democracy Live and Microsoft.
After many voters in the military were not able to receive absentee ballots during the 2008 presidential election, Congress passed The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which stipulates that citizens should have access to ballots 45 days prior to their state’s primary day elections.
Reader Comments