On Feb. 3, the Iowa caucuses—the first official Democratic nomination of the year—stumbled over new technology hurdles. For the first time, the Iowa Democratic Party tried to implement electronic polling via an app. Precincts were supposed to use the app to relay information back to party headquarters. The app had been developed by a small start-up, Shadow. On election day, it glitched out, and members of the party had difficulty using it to input their county’s votes. Results were delayed, and it will likely trigger a recount. In the meantime, public fear and frustration towards technology’s involvement in elections has heightened.
It has become clear that until a cleaner and more efficient mechanism is developed to garner votes, it is best to stick to paper. What we witnessed last Monday was the sloppy stitchwork of the state government. They patched together a new, untested app merely days before voting, and their only backup plan was phone lines that quickly backlogged once the app failed to deliver. It was a novice error by a government that is known to lag behind the tech sector and is still trying to grapple its way out of the dark ages.
It is important to acknowledge that the app was created with good intentions, and the issue it experienced was only technological, not a third-party attempt to infiltrate the ballots. Idealistically, it was supposed to enable precinct chairs to vote with the tap of a button and have the app do all the hard work by automatically counting votes.
But it ran into a “coding error,” meaning that the process used by the app to transmit results was producing inaccurate numbers. It was only released a few days before polling, so no formal overview of how to use the platform was given to members of the party and many ran into their own technical problems.
It is safe to say future polling for the remainder of the election season will lean towards paper methods. Yet it opens up the question: should the U.S. government still look to electronic voting methods?
Yes. Before the polling process can become shorter, it must become longer. Any technological methods used must be done in conjunction with paper. Work needs to be put in now to create an effortless process in the future. Rather than enlisting the work of an unknown start-up that has not even completed a test run, we should put the time, resources and effort into creating an app that can actually track polling. As seen by Shadow’s attempt, it is not too hard to make—it is hard to make correctly.
Media outlets will dramatize this debacle, but it appears to only be an internal error on Shadow’s end. If the company had done its due diligence beforehand, it would not have been a concern. We must stop cutting corners and running ourselves around in circles. It is about time we go about it from another, sharper, angle.
