Orange County Elections Office Supplements BIO-key Fingerprint Scanners With PortalGuard IAM Solution

The Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office in Florida has expanded its relationship with BIO-key. The Elections Office had previously deployed BIO-key’s EcoID scanner back in 2019, and will now be supplementing that with the PortalGuard Identity and Access Management solution to further consolidate its identity and access management operations.

BIO-key highlighted the seasonal nature of elections work as a key factor in the County’s decision. In that regard, it noted that elections offices often have large numbers of full- and part-time workers, in addition to volunteer staff during in the lead-up to the polls. The Office needs to onboard all of those workers as quickly and efficiently as possible, while still ensuring that only authorized workers have access to sensitive voter data.

PortalGuard offers a viable solution to that problem. The platform offers support for sixteen authentication factors (including several biometric authentication factors), and generates an auditable record of each login event. That means that the Office knows exactly who has access to what information, even when staff members are logging in from shared workstations, as is often the case in Orange County.

PortalGuard is compatible with the EcoID scanners, which are compliant with the FIPS standard. The Elections Office used the scanners to identify employees with fingerprint recognition.

“Our expanding engagement with County Supervisor of Elections Offices confirms that we understand their unique security use cases and that our tailored IAM solutions meet their needs,” said BIO-key Chairman and CEO Mike DePasquale. “BIO-key enables election officials to meet the challenges of an evolving threat landscape in an easy to deploy and cost-effective manner.”

BIO-key recently unveiled the EcoID II, the latest iteration of its USB fingerprint scanner. PortalGuard, meanwhile, has proven to be extremely popular with academic institutions, and with government agencies, including the Departments of Justice and Defense. BIO-key also took PortalGuard to the National Association of Counties Conference in July.

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August 27, 2021 – by Eric Weiss