US official calls Cook's idea to vote on iPhone 'preposterous'
Just a few days after Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Americans should be able to vote on an iPhone, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose called the idea "preposterous."
Credit: WTOL
Following the passage of a controversial voting law in Georgia, Tim Cook weighed in by saying technology could be the answer to making voting easier. In an interview with The New York Times, he suggested that smartphones could be a solution to voting rights issues.
But LaRose, Ohio's chief election officer, said he "aggressively" opposes that idea. "Not on my watch. Not in Ohio," he told FOX Business.
"I think this is a classic example of one of these, kind of, elites, thinking they have a simple solution to a complex problem," the Ohio state secretary said.
As far as why, LaRose laid out a few reasons. He said that a certain degree of technological competence is required. Although he admitted that the technology could exist in the near future, it would be "more complicated than people realize."
For example, LaRose said that voting officials would need to be able to verify whether a voter "who they say they are" via multi-factor authentication. Additionally, the system would need to prove that the voter was actually the one holding the device. A paper trail for auditing purposes is also a necessity, LaRose contends.
"And then you have to sever the identity from the individual so that the individual can cast a secret ballot and not have the way they vote tracked by some government official, which is something we all very strongly believe in ... that is all very difficult to do," LaRose said.
He said the most important aspect of an election is "public confidence," meaning that "every vote is counted fairly and free of fraud and shenanigans." LaRose added that maintaining public confidence is much harder than technology competence.
LaRose went on to say that he shared concerns that social media platforms and technology companies limit or censor content from conservatives.
"It is evident that there is a bias by a lot of these tech companies toward the left, and the whole cancel culture idea of censoring people whose opinions we disagree with is a really corrosive and dangerous thing," LaRose said. "Why would you want to allow those same individuals to have any control over the actual process of elections?"
The Ohio Secretary of State added that technology could do "a lot of good things," and that's he's a fan of embracing it. However, he stopped short of saying that voting on a smartphone or internet-connected device was a good idea.
"The idea we would let people use iPhones or any other mobile device to do something as crucial as casting a ballot is just preposterous," he said.
Credit: WTOL
Following the passage of a controversial voting law in Georgia, Tim Cook weighed in by saying technology could be the answer to making voting easier. In an interview with The New York Times, he suggested that smartphones could be a solution to voting rights issues.
But LaRose, Ohio's chief election officer, said he "aggressively" opposes that idea. "Not on my watch. Not in Ohio," he told FOX Business.
"I think this is a classic example of one of these, kind of, elites, thinking they have a simple solution to a complex problem," the Ohio state secretary said.
As far as why, LaRose laid out a few reasons. He said that a certain degree of technological competence is required. Although he admitted that the technology could exist in the near future, it would be "more complicated than people realize."
For example, LaRose said that voting officials would need to be able to verify whether a voter "who they say they are" via multi-factor authentication. Additionally, the system would need to prove that the voter was actually the one holding the device. A paper trail for auditing purposes is also a necessity, LaRose contends.
"And then you have to sever the identity from the individual so that the individual can cast a secret ballot and not have the way they vote tracked by some government official, which is something we all very strongly believe in ... that is all very difficult to do," LaRose said.
He said the most important aspect of an election is "public confidence," meaning that "every vote is counted fairly and free of fraud and shenanigans." LaRose added that maintaining public confidence is much harder than technology competence.
LaRose went on to say that he shared concerns that social media platforms and technology companies limit or censor content from conservatives.
"It is evident that there is a bias by a lot of these tech companies toward the left, and the whole cancel culture idea of censoring people whose opinions we disagree with is a really corrosive and dangerous thing," LaRose said. "Why would you want to allow those same individuals to have any control over the actual process of elections?"
The Ohio Secretary of State added that technology could do "a lot of good things," and that's he's a fan of embracing it. However, he stopped short of saying that voting on a smartphone or internet-connected device was a good idea.
"The idea we would let people use iPhones or any other mobile device to do something as crucial as casting a ballot is just preposterous," he said.
Comments
that would be OK.
that would be an issue.
But yet, here we are.
I'm not saying that there's a good iPhone-based solution today. But to dismiss it because of "hacked in the cloud server" is preposterous, considering how much of our lives are on a "cloud server" right now.
I do think the Us needs to clean its act up with voting systems, as it is quite vulnerable to accusations of impropriety. Because it is vulnerable. Identifying that the voter is entitled to the franchise is important, and people should provide that when they vote.
Whatever ISP you use already has it, which means that Google or Facebook either already have it, or can get it easily. If you read AppleInsider, odds are, Apple has it already. Or, if you're a veteran, it's been leaked six times by the feds in the last 20 years. Nearly every state DMV has had a data breach of some sort.
I work on federal systems and we process all sorts of citizen services and have web front ends for many of them, like the TSP and its retirement benefits programs for federal workers.
We already do that. Reminder: per the previous administration’s own cyber security czar, 2020 was the most secure election in US history. DOJ confirmed the same. There was no meaningful voter fraud.
As for voter ID, you clearly don’t understand the issues. I live in the poor south and there are many, many American citizens without drivers licenses. Nor state IDs. Getting them requires vehicles and flexible work schedules. Not everyone can afford to spend 4+ hours at the DMV on a weekday, yet it’s still their god given right to vote. And we have systems that enable this - voter rolls, paper bills, witnesses, signed statements, etc.
The gold standard of modern voting machines produce a printed paper ballot, which you walk over and put into the box. The electronic part just makes it easier to use and get an immediate ballot count report.
Ignoring political rhetoric, imo, the primary problem with iPhone (or any phone) voting is expressed in the article above: preserving the secrecy of the ballot. It's one of the core tenets of our voting system. To be fair, it's surrounded by so much FUD it may have been hard to pick out.
Wait, you're asking what's more sensitive info? Tax info which we voluntarily give to the government every single year or our specific voting record which could be used by the party in power and the party trying to get in power, in horrific ways to manipulate the populace. That would be a national nightmare. Gonna go out on a limb and say it's how we vote that carries a higher level of sensitivity. What we make per year is easy for anyone to find out, and of no consequence really.
Now for something unimportant like voting, registering ineligible individuals at DMVs is good enough, mail-in ballots without even signature validation are good enough, seems like phoning it in should also be good enough.
I won't make a list of the problems, which would take tens of pages, but I'll tell you this. If it was easy, why doesn't Apple already do it? E.g., when I buy an iPhone, Apple has NO IDEA who I am (even if I buy it in an Apple store, [rather than Walmart] they didn't even require a credit card until recently, and even then, some credit cards are corporate and not personal.) I don't have to show them any ID to prove my identity. I could be an illegal alien. I could be a foreign diplomat. I could be a shared corporate phone. So exactly how does Apple propose that the government know who the person at the other end is, if Apple doesn't even know themselves? Is Apple going to rely on the identities provided by the telephone company which provides the wireless services? Wouldn't that be an important part of the process since Apple iPhones can be privately sold without informing Apple? And this is just 5% of the problem.
Most countries probably have their federal certificate policies online. Just google your country's own certificate policy and read it. I suspect that in the US only the federal government (no state government) has a certificate policy, and since voting is largely a state responsibility, each state would have to write one before any of this could work. I don't think the federal government has the constitutional authority to set up the certificate policy required for voting in the individual states. But the feds may have authority over voting in D.C., (also Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.) so that would be a good place to experiment, since it's such a geographically small zone, which is important when part of the policy involves visually verifying IDs to approve the device's certificate. If you can't get it going in a small jurisdiction first, then you certainly can't get it going nationwide.
The US probably won't be the first country to achieve voting on personal devices. It might be one of the last to get there due to constitutional issues. It's more likely that some dictatorship which already holds everyone's personal information can achieve this first. I can certainly see a country like China, which recently introduced digital currency, attempting this in the near future, since they are heavily invested into tracking their people already. Of course they don't have elections in dictatorships, but I can see China wanting to prove their technological superiority (and at the same time improve on their ability to track citizens.) My bet would be on Singapore getting there first. They have an interest in these sorts of technologies, and they have a good mix of high tech, small geography, and a very dominant single political party to make this happen fast, if they want to.