Government Technology

David Macdonald: Alameda County Information Technology Director Tracks Ballots with RFID


You May Also Like

March 3, 2009 By

After an election, it's not unusual for a few voting irregularities to pop up that leave observers scratching their heads. Even more frustrating to voters are the dumbfounded looks on the faces of election officials when these problems happen.

Many officials who struggled in 2008 will likely look to a man with much more of a clue on the matter -- David Macdonald, IT director and registrar of voters in Alameda County, Calif. In 2007, Macdonald implemented a radio-frequency identification (RFID) paper-ballot tracking system, aimed at avoiding some of the ballot-tampering problems that have plagued other counties.

Whenever a ballot box changes hands, someone should record the exchange on paper, which election workers often forget to do, Macdonald said.

"We have 831 polling places with almost 6,000 poll workers. That guarantees someone's going to forget something," Macdonald said. Gaps in the chain-of-custody record raise suspicions about potential monkey business.

To alleviate those concerns, Alameda County attaches an RFID tag to each box of paper ballots on Election Day. Memory packs that contain the ballot totals for each box -- therefore allowing for cross checking -- also receive RFID tags.


View Full Story

You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/e-government/David-Macdonald-Alameda-County-Information-Technology.html


| More

Comments


Add Your Comment

You are solely responsible for the content of your comments. We reserve the right to remove comments that are considered profane, vulgar, obscene, factually inaccurate, off-topic, or considered a personal attack.

GovTech Papers and Case Studies View Library


Sponsored Links



Phone RSS

Government Best Practices

» A New Model for Human Resources
» Abandoning the High Cost of Enterprise Content Management



Government Technology
Public CIO
Emergency Management
Digital Communities