New Jersey tested the waters on digital voting during Sandy’s aftermath | Democracy, elections, and voting at Democracy Chronicles

By Leah Dearborn

A look back on how New Jersey handled the 2012 presidential elections during Superstorm Sandy may provide some insight on how to improve digital voting in the future. A column by Brian Heaton at Governing.com states:

Hudson County Clerk Barbara Netchert explained the biggest issue was that when voters heard the word “email” many who were unaffected by the storm ignored the phrase “displaced by Sandy” and tried to vote electronically instead of going to the polls like normal.

“We were inundated,” Netchert said. “My people could not … keep up with the amount of requests coming into our mailbox. People were then making the decision to email other people within the system just to make sure that it got here. So we had a lot of duplicates and it was just a daunting task.”

But despite several pervasive issues with the system, both Netchert and fellow Clerk Kristin Corrado express within the article that digitized voting seems imminent, given the younger generation’s comfort with the technology.