TALK OF THE BROADBAND ECONOMY

With elections right around the corner, a new way for voters to cast their ballots may be close at hand. A St. Paul-based electronic systems designer and entrepreneur wants to bring his patented phone-based voting system, PhonElect, to the polling public.

Designer Patrick Tittle has a background in electronic payment systems, having designed the electronic tax and payment system for the Minnesota Department of Revenue. PhonElect, produced as a division of EPSIOM, is a combination of voice XML technology and secure Internet access that allows individuals to cast votes via any landline or wireless phone using voice recognition or touch-tone technology.

“After the 2000 election and the problems they've had, I thought there is another way to do this and a better way to do it. And going from there, you think what's the most ubiquitous device that people have, and it's going to be the telephone,” Tittle said. “Can you make it a voting device? It's pretty simple because voting is really just a choice, it's yes or no.”

A variety of security measures are in place to prevent voter fraud. To use the system, voters would dial a local or toll-free phone number, provide their driver's license or other identification number, answer a few random questions about information on their card and leave a recording of their name and address to serve as an audio autograph before being routed to their precinct's ballot. The voter is asked a question and then responds. At the end of the call, the voter gets a reference number, and they can call back to double check the accuracy of their ballot.

There are three levels of security, according to Tittle. One is the information the voter gives to identify himself.

“And the other side of it is the election officials go into a secured Web page, and it has all the data encrypted with it between the Web page and what I refer to as the ballot table, the information about the candidates,” he said. “Within that hosted server system, we use something that's called Defense and Depth, which is kind of an industry standard as far as your firewall and your intrusion detection system. The ballot information is on a secured Web page.”

Tittle said the third level of security is that the tallies are a read-only file and cannot be manipulated. On the back-end, the product can use a virtual private network to limit access to only election officials.

The project was funded in part from social responsibility-based seed capital at the University of St. Thomas business school. The system is expected to be most beneficial to homebound or absentee voters, but Tittle said election officials also stand to benefit from the system as it would cut down on lines, reduce manpower at the polls and allow for faster vote tallying.

“If you really want to increase voter participation, you've got to change this rigid system we put in 200 years ago. Why don't we bring technology into the voting process?” he asked.

The system is currently awaiting Election Assistance Commission certification and has been demonstrated in Montana and Oregon.