The initial concept behind the validating of votes was to set up a system where users could submit their vote for the new Maryland Electronic Capital home page, but prohibit users from "stuffing the ballot box" by submitting multiple votes for any one finalist. To best monitor this issue Information Services determined that if we could validate that the user submitting the vote, was indicating a valid e-mail account as their e-mail address, this would eliminate users making up bogus names and bogus e-mail accounts to submit their votes and make them look like they were submitted by different individuals.

In theory, we determined that if we could respond back to the e-mail address the user entered, and the message did not bounce back to us as being an undeliverable address, we could then assume it was a legitimite vote. We realized we needed a script that would both e-mail a "Thank You" to the user submitting the vote and also e-mail their vote to an account which monitored all of the voting.

Ben went out on the internet and downloaded the FormMail script from Matt's Script Archive (http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/). This perl script is a pre-written script that automatically responds with an e-mail message to the user submitting the form. The data the user submitted in the form is also e-mailed to a specific e-mail address. Ben and Betsy modified the script to incorporate the syntax we wanted to appear on the MEC Finalist Form. We created a new e-mail account for mecfinal@mdarchives.state.md.us. This new account would be where all voting was monitored. Lynne installed another version of Eudora on her workstation to handle all mecfinal e-mail messages. As messages came in she verified that no duplicate "valid" entries had been submitted.

Thus with all the scripts, e-mail accounts, etc. in place, when a user submits their vote a message is e-mailed back to their account and another message is mailed to the mecfinal account. If anyone submits an invalid e-mail account, the message being sent back to the user bounces back to the mecfinal account and that vote is then ignored. Users are informed in their responding e-mail message that duplicate votes will be ignored.