Local election in U.S. to allow voting via smartphones

MANILA, Philippines – A district in Seattle will allow voting via smartphones in an upcoming local election for its board of supervisors, a first for US elections, the NPR reports. 

King County, a district that the report says has had historically low vocal turnout, will allow about 1.2 million voters to cast their ballots via their phones. It’s reportedly the first time that mobile voting will ever be used in a US election. Only about 1% of the voters have been participating in these local elections, to be held on February 11. 

But cybersecurity experts appear to be vehemently opposed to the idea: voting remotely via a device and network that can both be hacked will never be safe and valid. 

“There is a firm consensus in the cybersecurity community that mobile voting on a smartphone is a really stupid idea,” Duncan Buell, a computer science professor at the University of South Carolina who specializes in election technology, told NPR. “People want to believe that they can do everything on their phones.”

“If you’re doing phone voting or internet voting, it’s pretty much ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ You don’t really know what you’re getting in or what’s coming out the other side,” another expert, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the former chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, also told the media organization. – Rappler.com