The
Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), in
conjunction with several states and counties,
has begun conducting a large Internet
registration and voting demonstration for the
2004 election. This Congressionally
mandated project is called SERVE, which
stands for Secure Electronic Registration and
Voting Experiment.
Thousands of absentee uniformed services
personnel, their dependents, and overseas
U.S. citizens will have the opportunity to
register to vote and cast their ballots from
any Windows-based computer with Internet
access, anywhere in the world. County
election officials will use the SERVE system
to receive voter registration applications,
provide ballots to voters, and accept voted
ballots. These officials will use their
existing election administration systems to
process registrations and ballots.
“Security is everyone’s first
question about Internet voting, so we made
security the driving factor in the SERVE
system design,” said FVAP Director
Polli Brunelli. “We are working
closely with state and local election
officials to ensure that the integrity of the
electoral process is maintained.”
States currently expected to participate in
SERVE are Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii,
Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah and
Washington.
The SERVE project is
the latest in a series of technology
initiatives undertaken by FVAP as part of its
mission to improve access to the polls for
uniformed services personnel and overseas
American citizens. A small-scale proof
of concept pilot, Voting Over the Internet,
was successfully conducted for the 2000
election. In that experiment, 84
citizens located in 21 states and 11
countries returned ballots to jurisdictions
in Florida, South Carolina, Texas and
Utah. This was the first time that
binding votes were cast over the Internet for
federal, state and local offices. The
new SERVE system will build on the knowledge
and experience FVAP gained in this
groundbreaking and highly successful
project.
Brunelli said that all eligible absentee
uniformed services personnel and U.S.
citizens overseas are encouraged to use SERVE
to register and vote in 2004 by logging on to
www.SERVEUSA.gov.
The
Federal Voting Assistance Program is an
element of the Department of Defense.
Additional information on FVAP is available
at
www.fvap.gov.
