“I had heard concerns about the app, in particular that people didn’t know much about it and that there was a lot of secrecy around it,” says Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center's Democracy Program at New York University School of Law. “Even for the people who were supposed to be using it, there was very little training, and there was certainly no public testing of the app.”
Even worse, the Iowa Democrats' phone lines, which were supposed to be the fail-safe for the app, went down. Precinct leaders reported hours-long hold times and issues with their calls being disconnected. It seems that the hotline was expecting fewer calls than in previous years because of the app. Instead, the app actually increased call volume, as frustrated precinct managers tried to figure out what had gone wrong.
Despite all of this, the results should be sound. Every caucus vote was recorded on paper, meaning that officials will be able to verify that their final digital tallies line up with the actual results.
“In this case in Iowa I don’t think anyone will need to doubt what the results are,” says Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a group that promotes election system best practices. “Those were recorded; those were preserved according to the caucus procedures that they’ve been following for a long time. But the reporting mechanism failed. People have to think carefully about what the impact is going to be when introducing tech into voting.”
Monday night’s debacle underscores the stakes of debuting new technology in elections and the inherent risks of layering more tech into systems to solve problems rather than looking for their root cause.
“Technology can help, but it usually comes with added risks,” s ..
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