When Joe Church contemplated trudging out in the Canada cold to cast a vote for relatively minor and in some cases unopposed local candidates, the IT veteran did what any Canuck computing geek would -- he set out to build an alternative, electronic voting system. . . .
When Joe Church contemplated trudging out in the Canada cold to cast a vote for relatively minor and in some cases unopposed local candidates, the IT veteran did what any Canuck computing geek would -- he set out to build an alternative, electronic voting system. By utilizing a Linux-based Internet and telephone election system with 128-bit encryption, Church and his Ontario-based startup CanVote were able to give nearly 95,000 voters in 11 municipalities the option of Web- or phone-based votes in local elections last November.

"We started out with a customer rather than a technology," said Church, referring to the local government. "We didn't have a lot of money or time. We were trying to figure out how to get phone, Internet, and go. We didn't want to go back to paper ballots. We wanted something different, something better."

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