D.C. troop absentee voters can soon go online - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

D.C. troop absentee voters can soon go online

WASHINGTON — Washington voters who are overseas during an election — many of them military — will soon be able to vote by online secret ballot, the head of the city’s board of elections said Tuesday.

Overseas D.C. voters can currently return their votes by e-mail or fax, but that gives up the secrecy of their ballot. Overseas voters, who made up less than 1 percent of voters in the last election, can also send in paper ballots, but sometimes the paper ballots don’t make it on time.

Rokey W. Suleman, the executive director of the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, says the voters currently face a difficult choice.

“Some of them feel that they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. They need to get the ballot back, but we do have a tradition of secret ballot in this country,” Suleman said during a teleconference Tuesday.

During the November 2008 election, some 2,800 D.C. voters were sent ballots overseas, but fewer than half were actually returned and counted. Almost 300 were not counted because of problems like a voter forgetting to sign the envelope, and 36 were too late. The new system could help fix some of those problems.

Officials said an overseas voter using the new system would log on to a website run by the elections board. They would enter information that proves their identity like their voter identification number and address. Then, they would get a one-time use PIN would allow them to log in and obtain a ballot. Once submitted, the marked ballot would go into a kind of “electronic envelope” that would identify the voter but conceal their choices.

After the election, the electronic envelopes would be removed, separating the voter’s information from their ballot, which would then be counted. Voters would get a confirmation their ballot had been submitted and be able to check back to see where it is in the process.

The project, called “Digital Vote by Mail” will be open source, which means that the public will be able to examine how the software works. That’s important because it ensures transparency, officials said. District officials are working with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, a California group, to develop the process and ensure it is secure. The system is expected to be tested in July and to be used for the first time during the September primary.