Voting season comes with many challenges. Officials, candidates, and campaigners work hard every season to increase voter turnout, but trying to get more people to vote comes up against concerns over election security. With election interference becoming more and more intense, and the political landscape becoming more and more polarized, questions over the best way to collect votes are increasingly harder to answer.
Iowa is attempting to make voting more efficient and accessible by introducing a voting app for this year's caucus. As of now, the Democratic Party who introduced the app say it's meant to transmit results to the public more quickly; you won't be able to actually vote on the app itself.
Iowa has a very unusual voting process for electoral caucuses: rather than choosing one candidate and casting one vote, voters choose a favorite candidate but may end up voting for someone else if their chosen candidate doesn't get a high enough percentage. The votes are held in person in churches, gyms, and recreational centers across Iowa, and voters must physically stand in their candidate's "corner".
Voting in Iowa is handled by the state party rather than local and state officials. Each voting location reports results to that central party; that communication is how each voting location learns which candidates have reached the threshold and which voters will need to move to their second choice. Previously, vote counts and similar information would be relayed to the central party by phone.
Because the votes are held in person, there will be plenty of witnesses to verify the amounts, as well as paper records, if the app is hacked. The real concern is that incorrect information could be reported because of a hack and that the party would have to make a correction. With voting distrust and fear of interference by the party particularly high, one retraction could completely destroy voters' trust in the process, as could a system crash.
Doug Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa and a former caucus precinct leader, told NPR, "Once you report something, it's really hard to undo it, no matter how many retractions you print, no matter how many apologies you say, it's too late. From that point of view, someone hacking the reporting process, even though its purpose is entirely informal, not intended to have any permanent importance, is something that could be very disruptive."
Even so, the party is moving forward with their plan. They have declined to provide any information about the designers of the app or about the specific security measures in place. Troy Price, state party chairman, says there are "redundancies built into the system": "If there's a challenge, we'll be ready with a backup and a backup to that backup and a backup to the backup to the backup. We are fully prepared to make sure that we can get these results in and get those results in accurately."
This isn't the first time Iowa has tried to use the web to make their voting process more accessible. Last year the party announced a plan to allow Iowa voters to cast their ballots remotely, but the danger and likelihood of hacking convinced them to scrap the plan. Now, despite the concerns of tech experts and security officials, Iowa will attempt to wade into the internet waters again.