(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-01-21 17:18

Everyone Counts has been building elections software for a decade, running the British Labor Party's online voting since 2000 and other British elections since 2003, chief executive officer Lori Steele said.

Online voting may give absentee voters more assurance that their ballots are being counted, since confirmation is not available in some counties. The Everyone Counts software even lets voters print out a receipt, unlike most electronic voting machines now in use in many states.

"We've had no security breaches. We do constant monitoring," Steele said. Online voting "provides really a higher standard of security than is available in any other kind of system, including paper."

Steele said a number of US states had contacted her company to inquire about online voting for the 2008 presidential election.

"There are many, many states in the US that would like to be offering this to their expatriate voters, their military voters and their disabled voters," Steele said.

But online voting has been slowed by a lack of funding for pilot programs. In a floor speech this month, Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., pushed for the distribution of money already approved under the Help America Vote Act so that states can improve ex-pat voting before the general election.

Some 6 million Americans living abroad are eligible to vote in US elections, but only a fraction do so. Until recently, the only option was to mail absentee ballot request forms to the last US county of residence, then wait in hopes that shaky mail systems would deliver the ballots in time to vote.

The system is so unreliable that of 992,034 ballots requested from overseas for the 2006 general election, only 330,000 were cast or counted, and 70 percent of those not counted were returned to elections officials as undeliverable, the US Election Assistance Commission found.

In 2004, Juliet Lambert took her Oregon ballot to the US Embassy in Mexico City, where drop service is available because of Mexico's notoriously undependable mail.

"I had to go through security to drop off my ballot, and I remember thinking I really must want to vote," said Lambert, a 37-year-old caterer who works with Democrats Abroad in Mexico. "I think it can be really daunting for people."

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