As of yesterday, 9 a.m. Pacific time, all 16,000 approximate members of the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences Academy have the ability to cast their votes for the 66^th Primetime Emmy awards online. Thanks to Everyone Counts’ eLect® software, voting has become easier than ever. The addition of online voting was designed to increase the number of voters in a safe, secure and private manner. They figure, the more user-friendly the process is, greater the member participation will be. “This migration to an all-digital, online voting procedure will ensure that voting is easy, private and secure,” said Television Academy Chairman and CEO Bruce Rosenblum in a statement. “This is all part of our ongoing mission to activate greater member engagement."

Everyone Counts industry-leading Software as a Service voting platform eLect has been improving voting processes for governments and member organizations throughout the world since 1997. When compared with voting by mail, eLect increases participation, while improving security, access for voters and audit ability of the voting process.

“Everyone Counts is thrilled to deliver members of the Television Academy a secure and modern way to vote for the Emmy’s at this important time in the evolution of television," said Lori Steele, Everyone Counts Founder, Chairman and CEO. “Advanced technologies are transforming every element of how people engage with the art of television programming. Everyone Counts does the same for voting. Our state of the art voting solutions bring modern technical advances to long-standing traditions that people value, increasing convenience and security, while enhancing the user experience.”

Online voting will only be available for the nomination process, which runs until June 20. Once nominations are in and announced on July 10, final votes will be placed on paper. The decision to limit online voting to only the nomination round was partly made because of NBC’s busy schedule. "We have such a whammy this year," Academy's senior vice president of awards, John Leverence said in an interview with TheWrap. "This is the first time we're doing online voting, and we're in the NBC year so we have the truncated schedule. And we just felt, let's not bite off too much this first year. We'll figure out how to do the online voting in the easier part of it, which is the nominating phase, before we get into the more complicated final round."