The agreement would create new guidelines for everything from food safety to fracking, financial markets, medical prices, copyright rules and Internet freedom.
The Future Of Voting?
“When New York overseas voters cast ballots in elections, few likely know they’re relying on a small tech company based in Barcelona, Spain.”
So begins a brief, glowing New York Times blog profile of Scytl, the Spain-based firm that in January 2012 acquired 100 percent of SOE Software, the leading software provider of election management solutions in the United States.
The Times’s article earlier this month, which reads more like an Scytl press release, notes the global financial crisis has caused governments to turn to Scytl to save money on election costs.
New York is just one of about a dozen states deploying Scytl software in elections.
Last year, a Scytl news release boasted that the company’s “electronic pollbook solution recently achieved a significant milestone by eclipsing the 100th implementation in the United States.”
Scytl also supplies overseas and military ballots for several states.
Scytl may soon see a jump in U.S. interest. In January, President Obama’s special commission on election reform recommended voting electronically in the future, even suggesting that tablet computers, such as iPads, be used to cast votes.
Obama’s 10-person Presidential Commission on Election Administration released its recommendations in a 99-page document available online.
A review of the commission’s full paper finds extensive recommendations for electronic voting.
The document states that software-only products “can be integrated with off-the-shelf commercial hardware components such as computers, laptops, tablets, scanners, printers, and even machine-readable code scanners and signature pad products.”
“Tablet computers such as iPads are common components of these new technologies. They can be integrated into the check-in, voting, and verification processes in the polling place.”