AOL Government: Election Districts Enfranchise Overseas Voters With Help From The Cloud

There are few aspects of modern life that haven't been touched by information technology. One of them is the voting process for U.S. overseas military personnel. For the most part, it's still done by snail mail. A soldier abroad receives a ballot by mail, marks it manually and returns it by mail.

"We've been doing this since the 1860s," said Paul Lux, supervisor of elections for Okaloosa County in northwest Florida. But that's in the process of changing.

Okaloosa and 12 other Florida counties have deployed a one-stop Web portal that lets overseas voters access their ballots online. They can mark their ballots on screen or print them out. While they still have to return the ballots to their voting districts by mail or fax, election officials are looking toward a time when absentee voters can return their ballots electronically.

How many voters does this impact?