Patent ID: 8047435

Claim:
Method for taking and counting votes of a plurality of voters for an election comprising: a) sensing, with a biometric sensor, a biometric presentation of a biometric feature of each voter, the biometric presentation being made by the voter for a desired voting transaction for the election, the biometric presentation being inherently statistically unique and irreproducible and the biometric sensor having a resolution which is sufficient to detect the uniqueness and irreproducibility of the biometric presentation, resulting in the generation of a statistically unique and irreproducible security code for the biometric presentation; b) comparing the security code with stored security codes stored previously in an election database for the election to determine if the security code is within a voter template of any of the stored security codes, determining if the voter has voted previously; c) if the voter has not voted previously, accepting ballot selections of the voter for the election and generating a ballot code based upon the ballot selections; d) appending or linking the unique and irreproducible security code to the ballot code, generating a unique and irreproducible ballot security code; e) storing the ballot security code in the election database; f) completing a vote count for the plurality of voters by extracting and counting the ballot selections of each voter from the election database; and g) comparing a plurality of the security codes of the election database with a prior election database to determine if any of the security codes from the prior election has been fraudulently reused for any of the compared security codes of the election data base to generate a fraudulent ballot security code for the election.