Ballots in the Cloud: Improving Absentee Voting for Our Military Personnel

Monday, 23 January 2012

Posted By : Tim Solms - General Manager, Defense, at Microsoft

It’s an unfortunate irony that many U.S. military personnel stationed overseas – nearly 300,000 in 2010 – have difficulty voting in elections back home. Fortunately, a new cloud computing service is helping overcome the tyranny of distance and help them exercise the right they defend for us all.

LiveBallot - a cloud-based service that enables absentee voters to securely access their ballots from anywhere in the world – is helping military personnel, as well as citizens living overseas, efficiently access their Presidential ballots online for the first time in history. Over 1,200 Florida residents from 40 counties have already used LiveBallot to access ballots to vote in the State’s Republican Presidential Primary, which takes place January 31st. And starting last Friday, all Virginia residents living overseas gained access to their ballots online as well.

Created by Democracy Live, LiveBallot is hosted and delivered via Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform. Users can fill out ballots online and return them by email, snail mail or fax. LiveBallot aims to remove a longstanding hurdle for all Americans living overseas: ensuring their votes get counted with everyone else’s. No one is precisely sure how many Americans live in other countries. The 2010 U.S. Census estimated more than 1 million, while the U.S. State Department estimated more than 5.2 million in 2009. Whatever the total number is, apparently hardly any of them vote: The nonprofit Overseas Vote Foundation (OVF) found that barely 262,000 people (6.8 percent) of an estimated 4 million overseas civilians participated in the 2008 election. Even that small turnout, however, could easily swing an election, especially this year. The 2012 Republican presidential primaries have already shown that every vote will matter in this election, with a relatively small number of votes – sometimes dozens or fewer – deciding major outcomes.

While Americans overseas have many reasons for not voting, OVF’s research found that the inability to return ballots in time was the most common obstacle would-be voters encounter. Many expats that request ballots either don’t receive them or receive them too late to make filing deadlines, OVF said. By eliminating time spent waiting for a ballot to arrive, LiveBallot helps voters respond quickly enough to meet submission deadlines.

LiveBallot has the distinction of enabling the first vote cast in the 2012 Republican primaries, from a Florida resident living in Thailand. Votes have already come in from six continents. In addition to Virginia and Florida, California is launching LiveBallot in April before its statewide primary in June. What’s more, the technology doesn’t just help overseas, it helps overcome accessibility hurdles stateside, too. Washington State is using it to provide absentee ballots to voters with disabilities this election cycle.

Thanks to LiveBallot, 2012 will be the year that cloud computing increased access and efficiency on behalf of our democracy.

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