Port 3223: DIGIVOTE — A Vote-Server from Another Era

What Port 3223 Is

Port 3223 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These are ports that someone — a company, a developer, a standards body — formally requested from IANA, the organization that assigns port numbers, to associate with a specific application.

IANA's registry lists port 3223 for both TCP and UDP as: DIGIVOTE (R) Vote-Server.¹

DIGIVOTE: Electronic Voting on Magnetic Stripe Cards

DIGIVOTE was an electronic voting system deployed in Belgian elections. Belgium was an early adopter of electronic voting, running two parallel systems: Jites and Digivote. Both worked the same peculiar way — voters used a touchscreen to mark their choices, and the machine recorded the ballot onto a cardboard card with a magnetic stripe.² Not a touchscreen that tallied directly. A ballot-marking machine. The card then got fed into a separate reader to be counted.

It was a hybrid: electronic convenience, physical record. The vote-server component, running on port 3223, handled the coordination between polling machines.

Belgium ran these systems from the 1990s into the 2000s, with ongoing debate about auditability and transparency. DIGIVOTE's port registration is a small artifact of that era — a product that shipped, ran in real elections, and got its port number.

Will You Ever See Traffic on Port 3223?

Almost certainly not. DIGIVOTE's commercial deployment was limited and geographically specific. The system is not in common use today. Port 3223 is one of thousands of registered ports tied to specialized, legacy, or niche applications that occupy the registry but generate no measurable traffic on the public Internet.

If you see something listening on port 3223 on a machine you manage, it's not DIGIVOTE — it's an application that happened to pick this port, either by configuration or conflict.

How to Check What's Using This Port

# macOS / Linux — show the process using port 3223
sudo lsof -i :3223

# Linux alternative
ss -tlnp | grep 3223

# Windows
netstat -ano | findstr :3223

The process ID returned will tell you exactly what's there.

Why Unassigned (and Lightly Used) Ports Matter

The registered range exists so applications can have a consistent, predictable port without stepping on each other. In practice, many registered ports are barely used in the wild — they represent products that shipped in narrow contexts, internal enterprise tools, or systems that were superseded.

This matters because any of these ports can become collision points. When a new application needs a port and doesn't bother checking the registry, it might land on 3223 and conflict with a system that actually uses DIGIVOTE. The registry is imperfect but it's the coordination mechanism we have.