Perhaps more interesting is Shoup's service strategy. The company plans not only to store and maintain machines but also to train poll workers and even, in nonpolitical elections like those held for unions, to staff and manage the election process. Such services will require considerable beefing up of Shoup's 20-person staff.
If the presidential election prompted Caruso to push things forward, it caused James Adler to take a step back. Adler is CEO of Votehere, a 50-employee company with headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., that develops encryption and digital-signature technology. Shortly after its launch, in 1996, Votehere began focusing exclusively on secure online voting. The national conversation that sprang up post-Florida served as a kind of impromptu focus group for those plans. "After the election we realized people are not going to jump from punch cards to the Internet," Adler says. "One-third of counties use punch cards, and many of them would move [to new systems], and we had to have something viable for them."
So Adler redesigned his software to make Internet usage optional. Votehere Election System, Version 3.0, which was scheduled for release in April, now also runs on a Compaq iPAQ computer. The voter gets an encrypted key the size of a dime, which, when inserted into a reader attached to the machine, brings up a screen with the correct ballot. If the government gives its approval, the product will allow votes to be cast at polling places and, in the future, from a variety of locations by way of the Internet -- even if those locations are actually outside the precinct where the voters are registered.
"I don't want to be in the hardware business," says Adler, who points out that the real moneymakers in the industry are "the people who print the ballots each election." In essence Votehere is trying to develop a comparable niche -- "printing" or configuring new ballots on its software and leasing hardware to the precincts. Counties will pay on a per-election, per-precinct basis. Adler estimates the fee at $2,000 per precinct, including hardware, software, and staffing.
Compaq, Cisco Systems, and Entrust Technologies (a data-security business) are among the companies that have invested a total of $11 million in Votehere's third round of financing, which closed November 10. (The timing, Adler says, was a coincidence.) The company's relationship with Compaq, in particular, should prove useful, allowing Votehere to draw on 27,000 service people to set up and staff polling sites. "We realized we're going to need big partners to ramp up to support all the precincts," the CEO says.
A start-up named Election.com has taken a similar approach, teaming up with Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) to develop and market election software to governments around the world, including in the United States. Election.com, like Votehere, is supplementing its Internet model with one that relies on software run on-site on touch-screen devices.
But partnerships of large and small players will face intense competition from more equal marriages: for example, Microsoft, Unisys, and Dell have announced that they will work together on developing technologically sophisticated voting systems.
However ingenious their solutions, all these companies are basically shoveling supply into the yowling maw of demand. Indeed, it's difficult to recall such a rapid commercial response to a crisis since tamperproof seals became ubiquitous in the wake of the Tylenol murders. But the public's attention span is notoriously short. And Shoup's Caruso, for one, fears that opportunities may fade along with the urgency of the issue. "The problem is, people will study the new options," he says. "And by the time they finish, everyone will have forgotten."
Rifka Rosenwein is a senior writer at Inc.
Jumping through Hoops
Gaining certification for voting machines -- like running for office -- is a long, grueling process. All machines must be certified at both the state and the national level, and the federal manual alone is three inches thick, says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services.
Thirty-two states require that voting equipment meet the Federal Voting Systems Standards and/or be subjected to testing approved by the National Association of State Election Directors, based in Washington, D.C. Federal standards require that voting machines be accessible to the handicapped. Some new electronic machines have headphones to guide the blind, and most can be used by voters in wheelchairs.
Some states also re-quire their own tests to ensure, for example, that voting machines can withstand high and low temperatures or survive being dropped from a specified height. Software must conform to standards of security, accuracy, and anonymity.
Certification can take six weeks to six months and even longer if a vendor isn't familiar with the requirements. Once certified, companies are placed on the shortlist used by government purchasing agents. Marketing involves cultivating relationships with buyers that will last over several election cycles. Not surprisingly, the system has suffered its share of bribery and kickback charges, such as those brought in August 1999 against former Louisiana elections commissioner Jerry Fowler, who pleaded guilty in December to two felonies in a scheme that reportedly cost the state $8.6 million in inflated prices for voting machines and parts.
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