Current:Home > MyIowa Republicans will use an app to transmit caucus results. Sound familiar?-DB Wealth Institute B2 Reviews & Ratings
Iowa Republicans will use an app to transmit caucus results. Sound familiar?
lotradecoin access View Date:2024-12-25 21:19:38
Four years ago, Doug Jones was driving a stack of papers to Des Moines.
A now-retired expert in voting technology at the University of Iowa, and a former Democratic caucus precinct leader, Jones had a bad feeling in 2020 when he found out a third party was building opaque software meant to transmit results from the local level to the state party in real time.
"The idea of security through obscurity is almost always a mistake," Jones told NPR at the time. "Drawing the blinds on the process leaves us, in the public, in a position where we can't even assess the competence of the people doing something on our behalf."
The rest is history. The reporting app was riddled with problems, and it took days of combing through hard-copy results like the ones Jones delivered before anyone had any idea who actually won Democrats' contest.
"I haven't come to expect high technical expertise from the management of our political parties," Jones said in an interview this month.
This year, it's Iowa's Republicans who will use a brand-new app, designed by an undisclosed third party, to transmit results from the precinct level to the state headquarters.
There are some critical differences between the two processes, and Republicans in the state say they've been preparing the technology for close to a year, but Jones still sees a disturbing similarity: a lack of transparency.
"We have no clue who developed the software, only the customer's assertion that it's someone good," Jones said. "Four years ago, we had that kind of assertion of quality from the Democrats."
Unlike in many states in which local and state officials oversee the presidential primary election, Iowa is among the states that has instead given the responsibility of administering, staffing and funding caucuses to the state parties themselves.
Democrats did away with their first-in-the-nation caucuses after the 2020 debacle, but Republicans are still opting to let the state party oversee their first nominating contest.
The Iowa Republican Party hosted a briefing for reporters this month to show how the vote-reporting application would work, but declined to provide NPR with any more details about who built or designed the software. Conspiracy theories about the system have also begun to circulate, according to narrative tracking from the University of Washington.
According to the party, local caucus leaders will use the app to transmit results to the state party, which will then verify there aren't any data entry anomalies, before publishing them to a public-facing website.
"We have completed extensive testing with multiple parties in anticipation of a wide variety of issues typical of high profile, high traffic events including load balancing and distributed computing challenges, malicious actors, DDOS attacks and others," said Kush Desai, the state party's communications director. "We will not be sharing other specifics ahead of time as to not compromise the system."
Importantly, the reporting software will only transmit unofficial results on caucus night. The state party will rely on paper submissions (verified by caucus-goers in the publicly viewable precincts) to tally the official results, so even if the app malfunctions or is hacked, that won't affect the official tally. The party will also operate a phone hotline for precinct leaders to call if they need to.
"They don't want an egg on their face like the Democrats had," said Joe Kiniry, chief scientist of the open-source election technology company Free & Fair. "But from a operational point of view, the caucuses are going to run whether the system works or not."
Another key difference between the Republicans' system and the failed one the Democrats used in 2020 is what the party is asking the software to do. In 2020, Democrats used a complicated formula for awarding delegates, which the app was supposed to help calculate. Republicans are just using the app to record vote totals.
That simplicity has Kiniry optimistic that the system will work Monday, but he's still troubled by the lack of information about who made it.
"The fact that they're not being transparent just leaves a bad taste in the mouths of people like myself," Kiniry said. "It's not a good sign in general for anything, but especially for any technology relevant to trustworthy elections."
veryGood! (8)
Related
- Get 10 free boneless wings with your order at Buffalo Wild Wings: How to get the deal
- Abigail Breslin Mourns Death of My Sister’s Keeper Costar Evan Ellingson
- Iowa to pay $10 million to siblings of adopted teen girl who died of starvation in 2017
- Civilians fleeing northern Gaza’s combat zone report a terrifying journey on foot past Israeli tanks
- Anchorage police shoot, kill teenage girl who had knife; 6th police shooting in 3 months
- The Best Gifts for Celebrating New Moms
- Michigan State men's basketball upset at home by James Madison in season opener
- Nashville investigating after possible leak of Covenant shooting images
- NASA Shares Update on Astronauts Stuck Indefinitely in Space
- Starbucks increases U.S. hourly wages and adds other benefits for non-union workers
Ranking
- Head of Theodore Roosevelt National Park departs North Dakota job
- Broadcast, audio companies will be eligible for Pulitzer Prizes, for work on digital sites
- Mexico’s Zapatista rebel movement says it is dissolving its ‘autonomous municipalities’
- One of Virginia’s key election battlegrounds involves a candidate who endured sex scandal
- TikToker Nicole Renard Warren Claps Back Over Viral Firework Display at Baby’s Sex Reveal
- Bronny James, Zach Edey among 10 players to know for the 2023-24 college basketball season
- Damar Hamlin launches scholarship in honor of Cincinnati medical staff who saved his life
- Maine man sentenced to 15 years for mosque attack plot
Recommendation
-
State, local officials failed 12-year-old Pennsylvania girl who died after abuse, lawsuits say
-
Five years after California’s deadliest wildfire, survivors forge different paths toward recovery
-
Serena Williams Aces Red Carpet Fashion at CFDA Awards 2023
-
The college basketball season begins with concerns about the future of the NCAA tournament
-
Detroit judge orders sleepy teenage girl on field trip to be handcuffed, threatens jail
-
Rashida Tlaib defends pro-Palestinian video as rift among Michigan Democrats widens over war
-
New Mexico St lawsuit alleges guns were often present in locker room
-
New measures to curb migration to Germany agreed by Chancellor Scholz and state governors
Tags
-
lotradecoin account registration process
lotradecoin two-factor authentication setup
lotradecoin advanced analytics dashboard
lotradecoin support
lotradecoin trading tutorial for beginners
lotradecoin trading account types
lotradecoin pricing
lotradecoin account registration process
lotradecoin KYC verification process