Last monday at the Iowa caucuses, voting was done on an app developed by a tech firm by the name of Shadow. This was new for the caucuses, and it was tried out for the first time on that day. Almost spectacularly, it failed in the one purpose it was designed for, and caused a delay in the results of the voting. While a day’s worth delay doesn’t seem too important, the use and failure of an app in voting for an election represents a much larger problem that could at its worst threaten the democracy of the United States.
First, let’s look at the tech itself. According to the CEO of Shadow, it functioned well during testing. However, when it came to the day of voting, many people, who mind you might be tech illiterate, had trouble downloading the app and logging in and later found trouble sending the results in. All this and more caused a catastrophic failure in voting, forcing people to manually call in the results and delaying the full votes for several days.
So, why does this matter? It was just a fault in the system, correct it and we’re good to go, right? After all, the use of technology in voting is extremely convenient, requiring less work for both voters and vote counters. Well, it’s never that simple. Electronic voting should not be an option to vote with due its vulnerability.
It should be no surprise that almost anything on the internet can be broken into by hackers. Websites, servers, computer, tablets, phones, heck, even your printer can be cracked open by tech savvy hands. This is no different with apps for voting elections. Unless some military grade encryption gets put in place (which, mind you, is expensive to develop), anyone with the right skills can easily influence the results in their favor.
This is extremely important, especially when Russian hackers were suspected of rigging the election in Trump’s favor. Obviously, we do not want foreign influences in our elections, but the ability of technology to be hacked is practically inviting them to do so.
In the caucus, the results that were released a day after they were supposed to weren’t actually the full results. Instead, it was only a certain percentage of the total states votes. The results named Buttigieg as the first place winner by a small yet sizable margin, but later with 100 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders was right on his tail barely falling behind. This again, like last years caucus, put more distrust in the DNC’s lack of bias, which isn’t good for the party in general.
In conclusion, the Iowa caucus has always been a mess of sorts. However, the use of vulnerable technology puts more distrust in one of the most important elections before the presidential election.
The Daily Technocrat 