Dr. Juan Gilbert Researches Possibility of Digitally Voting From Home
Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D., The Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and chair of the UF Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), is working on a possible solution to verify voters. With record-setting numbers of voters casting their ballots by mail this year (2020), Gilbert said he is concerned about a growing issue: signatures on those ballots not matching. Gilbert said he believes there needs to be another way to verify that voters are who they say they are.
“The longer we go with signature verification, the error rate is just going to increase because you have generations who haven’t been accustomed to signing their name,” he said.
In the meantime, he said he’s created a new app for elections workers to use to curb the long lines outside of polling places. “I was watching TV, and I saw long lines in Wisconsin during this pandemic,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is terrible, we’ve got to do something about it.’”
His app is called inLine Ticketing System, and he said it allows election workers to issue tickets to voters using a QR code that would essentially hold a person’s place in line, allowing them to stay socially distant.
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