United States: We Put The "Ow!" In Iowa - Womble Bond Dickinson



United States: We Put The "Ow!" In Iowa




14 February 2020

Womble Bond Dickinson




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I woke up this morning to a text from a close friend wondering how long it would take me to write about the fact that as of this writing, we still do not have results from the Iowa caucuses last night due to problems with its untried voting app. I guess I'm firmly established on the "get off my lawn" beat.


The little-known corollary to the time-honored maxim "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is "if it's broke, don't replace it with something worse." The list of potential problems with using mobile technology for something as important as voting is long. Rule One might be "don't hire a company named 'Shadow, Inc.' to build your app." A fellow Hoya, Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown, said that "any type of app or program that relies on using a cellphone network to deliver results is vulnerable to problems both on the app and on the phones being used to run it . . . and that "[t]he consensus . . . is unequivocal . . .[i]nternet and mobile voting should not be used at this time in civil elections."


Any remote access application will add complexity to a task due to the need for identification, authentication, authorization, and security, of both the device and the person using it, as opposed to a simpler system based on paper or a ..

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