Voting by Mail

If anything cries out for Voteword, it’s voting by mail. Even though it’s been shown that vote-by-mail is reliable, convenient and administratively cost-saving, it would make a lot of people feel better if they could check that their ballot was received, recorded and counted. Voteword is a natural for this.

Here’s one way it could be implemented.

Ballots would be printed with the VoteWord on them in two places, but hidden from view. In one place, it could be much like the way the PIN is hidden on a gift card; in the other place on the ballot, it’s in a form that only the voting machine will understand – either encoded or embedded. The ballots are mailed and, upon receiving one, the voter scrapes off the “PIN-like” one and notes his/her Voteword. After filling in the ballot, the voter tears off the “receipt” portion which bears the readable Voteword and keeps it. He/she then mails the ballot, which contains the machine-readable Voteword, back to election central. When the voting worker feeds the ballot into the machine, it records the Voteword so each voter can look up their ballot and confirm that it was recorded correctly.