Everyone Counts (E1C), the Australian-developed electronic voting technology company that we’ve covered in the past (here and here), had a big win recently when, together with the City and County of Honolulu, it staged the successful completion of the world’s first all-digital Universal Access binding government election.
The company, now incorporated and based in San Diego, was originally founded by Australian technologist Craig Burton. According to the company’s US-based CEO, Lori Steele, the Honolulu election “significantly increased ballot access and security, while reducing costs for the City by more than half”. The election received mainstream coverage from The Washington Post and Business Week, among others.
It’s a great result for E1C, which despite being widely regarded as the best electronic ballot technology in the world, has battled to allay the concerns of governments and companies that all e-voting systems are inherently insecure and susceptible to corruption.
E1C has provided the platform to run corporate ballots for international blue chip organisations, including the Mortgage Industry Association, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG Australia. However, recently it has been focusing on increasing its adoption for governmental elections. It ran online voting for local elections in British cities in 2003 and 2007 and handled the “postal votes” of Australian Defence Force personnel stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other foreign locations during the 2007 Australian Federal election. Last year, the US Democratic Party entrusted E1C to handle absentee ballots during the protracted Primary campaign, attracting tens of thousands of votes from 164 countries.
