In a possible glimpse at the future of elections, a small number of voters in November’s midtermS will be able to vote via mobile app.
The app will predominantly be used by West Virginian military personnel serving overseas. To vote, users must first register by taking a photo of their government-issued ID and a selfie-style video of their face. The app then uses facial recognition technology to make sure the registered voter is, in fact, the same person casting their ballot.
Ballots are anonymized, and recorded via blockchain.
Predictably, not everyone is happy about this — particularly in the wake of concerns about possible interference in the 2016 presidential elections. While both the Boston-based development company behind the app and West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner insist the app is secure, others have voiced their worries.
“Mobile voting is a horrific idea,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CNN. “It’s internet voting on people’s horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote.”
The most high tech election yet?
Earlier this summer, members of the U.S. intelligence community met with tech companies to discuss the upcoming midterm elections. The atmosphere of the meeting with Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oath, Snap and Twitter was said to be “tense.” The central concerns involved Russian bots potentially buying divisive ads, posting unflattering images, and sharing fake news.
Apple has already announced tools that will share “trustworthy” curated news about the midterms, via a new Apple News feature.
Despite everyone’s best efforts, however, there’s no getting around the fact that, increasingly, technology is going to have a major role to play in elections.
If voting via mobile app can be pulled off effectively, this could be a great thing for prompting user engagement and lowering barriers that might otherwise stop people casting their ballot. But the more digitized the process, the greater the number of points at which the process could be interrupted or manipulated by hackers
Do you like the idea of voting via mobile app? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: CNN
