Last year President Obama issued an executive memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, calling upon the heads of all government executive departments and agencies to “establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration.” U.S. agencies were required to publish Open Government Plans” that outlined each group’s efforts to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations online and readily available to the public.” Obama also called upon agencies to “solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.”

This directive has led many agencies to establish better methods of feedback for the public and to encourage participation. Although Regulations.Gov has been around since 2002, more than 300 agencies are now using it to let the public submit comments on nearly 8,000 regulations per year. And Challenge.Gov was launched early this fall to award prizes and recognition for public participation in providing ideas and solutions for today’s government problems, issues and initiatives. Read the rest of this entry →

Watch Votenet’s latest webinar, “Top Ten Considerations for Bringing Your Elections Online,” held in conjunction with the Avectra Academy, or download the PowerPoint here.

The Votenet team regularly creates white papers, benchmark studies and tip sheets to help you improve voter turnout and understand the issues around voting events, both online and traditional. Click here to view the Votenet resource library, and sign up to receive emails on upcoming webinars and new resources.

In 1986, the IRS introduced electronic filing to a limited number of U.S. communities, and 25,000 taxpayers chose to e-file. This month, the IRS announced that e-filing had become so popular that they would no longer send the familiar tax form package to the 110+ million registered taxpayers.

According to the IRS, only 8 percent of individual taxpayers mailed paper forms for their 2009 taxes.  IRS spokesman Anthony Burke told CNN that they started cutting back the mailings last year, sending packets to just 8 percent of the nation’s taxpayers. “We’re finding that more and more people are choosing to e-file, and the number of paper returns is going down,” Burke said. The IRS expects to save more than $10 million with the eco-friendly switch.

When it comes to making a switch to interacting online, the IRS did things right. They spent time and effort both educating filers about the process and guaranteeing the security of their tax returns. They phased in the changes over a couple of tax seasons, and they’re still making paper forms available for download and at libraries. Now that they’ve blazed the way to create both trust and knowledge, groups that switch to online voting for elections and other voting events should reap the benefits. Read the rest of this entry →

Online voting systems and services are widely used by many national and international associations for their board of director’s elections.  Lately, we find more and more component groups looking toward online voting systems and services.

As defined on the ASAE website: “Components are an affiliated or independent society, chapter, branch, special-interest group, or division of an international, national, state, regional, or local organization. Component relations professionals make services and benefits come alive for association members through their affiliates.”  These groups could range in size from two members to thousands of members.

The dynamic between national and component organizations varies widely from deep involvement, and shared bylaws, to completely autonomous organizations, both legally and culturally.

Would a component group need to find their own online election vendor directly, or might they be able to rely on their national organization to supply the system and services?  Or would the national organization make a recommendation to the component group about their preferred vendor, and possibly also have a discount set-up? Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve heard it said on multiple occasions that good old-fashioned hand counting is the safest way to ensure election integrity. In fact, many awards shows tout the fact that their votes are hand counted and verified by real humans.  The wisdom behind it stems from the belief that manual attention to the process by “real” people is the only way to ensure votes are properly verified and tallied. Electronic systems can, after all, experience glitches, programming errors or hack attacks by would-be election throwers.

And while that theory may sound reasonable,  if I had to make a choice based on years of running elections both ways, I would pick electronic voting any day of the week. I don’t disagree that technology can sometimes function less than perfectly, but human error happens exponentially more often and almost always requires one or more re-counts to ensure the results are truly accurate. Add on the hundreds of hours it takes to administer a hand-counted election, and hand counting becomes even less appealing. Read the rest of this entry →

Note: This is Part 3 of a series on avoiding claims of election fraud by Andrew Cader, Votenet Senior Election Consultant. See Part 1: Password Concerns, and Part 2: Double Voting.

Fraud accusations can come in the form of the information the administrator has access to during the election.  It is up to those running the election to know their own rules and laws. If no member of the staff is supposed to be able to access the vote during the election, the administrators need to alert their online voting service provider to lock them out of the system.

At Votenet, if your voting is supposed to be completely anonymous, there is a setting on the ballot set up that you can choose to make the voting anonymous. This means the only information an administrator would have is results and who voted, but would not have access to “who voted how.”  If an administrator should not see results until the election is complete, there is a date and time setting in the set up that allows them to choose when the results can be viewed by an administrator. Read the rest of this entry →

Note: This is Part 2 of a series on avoiding claims of election fraud by Andrew Cader, Votenet Senior Elections Consultant. See Part 1: Password Concerns.

Besides concerns about voters sharing their passwords, an election event can be tainted if voters claim they were able to vote multiple times, or “double voting.” This can come up in a number of ways. Often times, administrators set up multiple election events that either run at the same time or will overlap. Voters may have access to multiple ballots in different elections. For universities, spring elections often consist of an SGA Election that the entire student body is eligible to vote on, but also a class officers’ election running simultaneously. Students would vote in the SGA election and their class election.  These are two separate elections. The confusion arises when the election administrator either combines ballots or duplicates similar questions on multiple ballots. Read the rest of this entry →