I was interested to see that the online voting system has changed this year to one powered by Simply Voting. I’m only a lit bit sad to see the old system retired – I wrote it in about 3 hours way back when, because we needed something and it was, barely, good enough to get us through the election and then as things go it stayed in that barely good enough state! I haven’t used Simply Voting before, but it looks reasonable. I used their fee calculator to see the potential costs based on paying for a single election. Not cheap! Possibly cheaper than building one depending on how many registered voters we have. I’m expecting that number to drop this year due to people not updating their profiles and thus being ineligible (and many of those are dead/dupe addresses anyway). I wonder if you pay for the number that votes, or the number that could vote?

I’m not too worried about a third party system, in many ways that feels safer than PASS having the data. I’d wish for free, but $12k for a solid election seems ok to me. The system generates voting receipts, which is interesting, I guess. Do they ever get used, or just voter reassurance? Here’s mine. Yes, I did vote for myself, but I’ll keep my own two votes confidential.