Dell Computers Presents Election 2004

Factual Questions
1

I need to give a little background to get to my question, so bear with me…and I hope you guys don’t think this is a “homework” question. I’ve tried to look it up…I promise!

I am doing a group project for one of my college classes. We are supposed to come up with a proposal or product and convince an imaginary group to accept it. Due to all the recent controversy, my group has decided it would be interesting to propose that the government should use computerized ballots. (Notice I didn’t say on-line!) Anyhoo…as you can imagine, there are a number of problems we are needing to find solutions to, one of which is how can we make it cost-effective for the government to want to buy computers for this purpose?

One guy suggested that maybe some big-name computer companies would donate the computers, as long as they could put advertising on the screen that would pop up as the people vote. I have several problems with this, but the main one is that it sounds illegal to me. But I’m having trouble finding anything on the web in regards to advertising on government ballots.

Any legal experts know anything about this? Or even where I might go to find some information? Would it be different state-to-state? County-to-county?

Hope that was clear…and any other suggestions anyone might have are very welcome! :slight_smile:

Oreo

2

two things.

  1. You probably wouldn’t need to advertise on screen. Just the news that Dell was dontaing the computers–plus the fact that they’d have all kinds of press when all of the news agencies got the election results from Dell (picture the Dell logo in the corner of every TV infographic)–would probably be advertising enough. You likely wouldn’t need to violate ballotspace.

Think of IBM handling the Olympics. You saw it on your TV screen at home, but people who were running the marathon, wearing transceivers, didn’t have ads popping up in front of their faces.

Of course, if multiple companies do it, then you have a problem.

  1. The companies only need to donate computers for one day (okay, if things go like this again, one month). And they don’t need to be high-end at all. Hell, you could do it with a bunch of Apple IIe’s and Commodore 64’s. So less expense there.
3

You may find this useful.

4

Thanks guys. retsin…great link!