Residents in the Town of LaSalle will have a new way to vote next month in the municipal election.
For the first time, the election will be done exclusively through internet and telephone voting.
Residents will be able to use their computer, smart phone, tablet or touch-tone telephone to cast their ballot.
"It's a pretty easy process," says Mayor, Ken Antaya. "You get a PIN number and you access either your computer or you call it in. We're providing it weeks in advance. You can vote at your leisure beginning October 12 until October 22. At the end of the day, they should be able to, conceivably, just press a button and at 8:01pm on election night you're going to know who won. It's as simple as that."
Antaya says it's all about convenience and efficiencies.
"Whenever you have a lot of people involved the chances of human error increase. I'm not going to say that computers are fail safe and obviously they're not. Something like this has been worked on for the last couple of elections and I think that they've worked out a lot of the bugs. I'm looking forward to seeing the results."
Antaya admits thee will be apprehension and says "obviously, people want to stay away from computers and 'what if I make a mistake?,' — this is almost fail safe, when you start taking a look at the human cost versus the mechanical costs and the internet costs, it's pretty easy to go along with it and I think it'll work."
The voting period begins on Friday, October 12 at 8:30am and goes until to Monday, October 22 at 8pm.
— with files from AM800's Zander Broeckel