Our Mission
Every voter will have secure access to a ballot, reliably counted
What does Everyone Counts do?
Working with election officials worldwide, Everyone Counts provides affordable, secure, transparent and universally accessible election systems. We understand election science, and our innovative and deeply experienced team of passionate, trustworthy election and technology professionals shares -and advocates- a singular vision. With experience on three continents and a commitment to accessibility, we deliver voting systems and services that give absolute accuracy and ease of use for voters, election officials, and poll workers. Everyone Counts ensures that everyone in every location with a right to vote can in fact vote, with a secure and accessible ballot that's reliably counted.
Why does it matter?
Democracy is the foundation of civil society. When citizens participate actively and believe in the electoral system, peaceful and constructive advancement of the nation is possible. When citizens are unable to vote, fairness and trust start to fade, leading to a breakdown of democracy.
We believe in delivering secure, reliable access to the vote to everyone with a legal right to vote. Everyone Counts is not about any political party nor even a single country, but about a profound belief in the importance of successful, secure elections to ensure democracy everywhere.
Overseas voters
Whether serving in the military, working as a missionary, studying overseas, or simply working or retiring abroad, six million Americans are located overseas. Many other countries have a large diaspora for economic reasons. Romania, having joined the EU, has more than 4 million citizens living and working throughout Europe. Mexico has more than 10 million citizens living and working in the USA and other countries, only 1% of whom voted in the recent Mexican Presidential election where absentee ballots were allowed.
Independent research shows that even with current absentee ballot systems, as many as 70% of overseas US citizens are unable to vote successfully in US elections. The main reasons are:
- Extreme delays in foreign (and military) postal delivery - both delivering the blank ballot and returning the voted ballot home. This delay is compounded when people move around, such as military personnel redeployments. The result is that huge numbers of ballots arrive too late to be legally counted. With only 30 to 45 days between the ballot creation and the voting cutoff, it simply doesn't work. Many overseas citizens have given up even trying to vote on time.
- The ease of making a mistake. About 20% of overseas voters don't get their votes counted because there are so many ways of making a paperwork mistake. Making a distinguishing mark on the paper is all it takes to get a ballot discarded in many states. Undervoting (skipping a line) and overvoting (marking more than the allowed number of choices) are both extremely common with modern pencil-mark forms. And procedural errors such as failing to write down a witness's mailing address invalidate absentee ballots in large numbers.
Enough is enough. The United States has had laws on the books since 1942 demanding that overseas citizens have the ability to vote reliably and privately, and it's still not happening. Using modern telecom and encryption technology, we have developed practical solutions and are committed to getting these voting systems in the hands of citizens overseas - starting with United States citizens and eventually expanding this service to overseas citizens of other democratic nations.
Citizens with Disabilities
In our modern world, we take it for granted that citizens with the right to vote can vote, and their votes will be privately and reliably recorded and counted. But for people with visual, motor, or other disabilities, too often that's not how it works.
Such voters are often forced to get someone else to vote for them, a violation of their basic Constitutional rights, or to forego voting altogether.
A Rutgers report from the 2008 federal election in the US showed that 44% of voters with disabilities were not able to vote on election day because of illness or their disability. Only 9.6% of voters with no disability cited illness or disability as a reason they could not vote. This, in spite of the U.S. government having spent $3 billion on "disability compliant" voting systems in polling stations over the past 6 years.
Ironically, most of these same people have access at home and at work to a computer they can use (often with adaptive devices) and/or a telephone they can use. Everyone Counts provides computer-based and telephone-based secure voting solutions that don't require reading or writing and that are compatible with a wide range of adaptive devices ranging from oversized keypads to screen-reading software. And we work with university experts in usability to ensure that our systems are easy to use and unconfusing, even for citizens not accustomed to voting themselves.
For more on the problems facing voters with disabilities, see the Disability Vote Project.
Emerging Democracies
Voting is the bedrock underlying democracy and, ultimately, free economies and healthy societies. The deep solution to inequality and poverty is to engage people in improving their own society. Any effective solution must achieve scale serving millions of people, permanence building lasting institutions and behaviors, efficacy delivering solutions that work and keep improving, and efficiency lowering costs upfront and over time. Everyone Counts voting systems are designed to deliver on all these criteria.
Even citizens at the base of the pyramid can become engaged in their country's future through voting. This requires voting systems that are secure (transparent, private, reliable, unchangeable) and accessible (geographically distributed, easy to learn, and easily usable by all citizens including those with disabilities or illiteracy). Sadly, this doesn't describe today's election systems.
Modern voting systems have relied on very expensive hardware, putting the strongest technology out of reach of all but the wealthiest and most urbanized areas. The alternative, pure paper voting, has proven inaccessible to millions of voters who cannot travel or cannot see, and susceptible to fraud, error, bogus ballot insertion, and ballot tampering and theft - even more so when distributed over a large land area.
Everyone Counts delivers voting systems using modern software technology delivered over cheap, off-the-shelf devices including laptop and netbook computers, traditional telephones, and mobile phones. Powerful encryption protects each voter's ballot as it is transmitted over phone lines, wireless/cellular networks, and powerful Internet lines. This combination of low cost and wide-area access makes it possible to offer secure voting even in developing countries. And modern usability technologies backed up with scientific usability research ensures that all sorts of voters can use the technology - without giving up their right to vote privately.
Measurable Outcomes
We routinely measure the success of our work:
- Increase access and participation by served voter populations
- Satisfaction of served voter populations, as measured in direct surveys
- Increased privacy of the voting process for served voter populations
- Satisfaction of election officials in areas served
Here are some examples of our successes:
Government opinions. Our systems deliver benefits not only to voters, but also to election officials. After a recent project we conducted serving thousands of voters in Honolulu, the election administrator said, "By choosing Everyone Counts' secure, easy-to-use solution, we have saved significant time and money on this election by streamlining the administrative process and cutting over $100,000 of costs in mailing and other expenditures".
Voter opinions. In a recent vote we conducted in Washington State, the majority of online voters chose to participate in a voluntary survey. The overwhelming majority of responses were positive, with comments like "very easy" and "wonderful". Voters cited 14 ways in which their experience had improved, including ease of signing in, not having to go to a post office or polling place, improved clarity of ballot marking, improved access to candidate information, and simplicity of use. This pilot involved electronic ballot delivery & marking with paper ballot return, and the most frequent request for improvement was to be able to return their votes electronically.
In our Vote Anywhere pilot project serving thousands of voters in Swindon, England, 94.2% of voters using our computer and phone based systems said the process was more convenient than going to a polling station; 91.8% said if such voting is available at future elections they would use it; and 30% of online voters said they would not have voted had online voting not been offered.
Independent evaluations. We conducted a national-election overseas online voting trial we conducted with the Australian Defence Forces. An independent assessment concluded that voter participation was more than double the rate in the previous, paper-based election; that 86% of surveyed voters found the service good or very good; and that the system was properly implemented and secure against multiple kinds of fraud or manipulation.
Doing Well by Making a Difference
Voting isn't a conservative issue or a liberal issue, and it's not a rich-country issue or a developing-country issue. It's a democracy issue. Everyone Counts is proud to be in the business of supporting democracy. The need for election solutions is large and growing, because democracy is large and growing. With 121 electoral democracies in the world, voting is a $16 Billion industry.
We combine the best of election science with the best of computer science and security technology to ensure that every voter will have secure access to a ballot, reliably counted. The compelling need for better voting systems led us to build a unique, mission-driven, results-oriented company: Everyone Counts.