Internet voting failed the Iowa Caucus. So why do we keep trying?

When it comes to conducting secure elections, keeping things old-fashioned is often the best bet. 

This simple reality can be broken down into two digestible nuggets of security wisdom: The internet and voting don’t mix. And auditable paper trails beat fancy digital recording devices every time. 

Security experts beat us over the head with these admonitions time and time again. And yet, as yesterday’s Iowa caucus screwup shows, we still have a lot of listening left to do.  

The Iowa Caucus app fiasco

The Iowa caucuses — trending on Twitter at the time of this writing as the “#IowaCaucusDisaster” — represent a spectacular failure in modern day election reporting. According to numerous reports, a shoddily tested app was employed to relay caucus results to party officials. That app failed to properly function, throwing presidential candidates’ campaigns — and the country — into a brief fit. 

Importantly, we should be clear that Iowa caucus-goers did not vote using the app. Rather, the caucus results — which were recorded on paper cards like the one shown above — were, after being tallied, reported to Democratic party officials via the app. Or, at least they were supposed to be. 

It was in this reporting phase that things took a turn for the terrible, with reports that the app had malfunctioned and perhaps tabulated results incorrectly. 

Senator Mark Warner emphasized the important fact that it was a mixture of incompetence and failure, rather than nefarious hackers, that was to blame. 

“There is no indication that the failures from last night’s Iowa caucuses were the result of malicious cyber activity,” he wrote. “But the chaos in Iowa is absolutely illustrative of America’s failure to take sufficient steps to protect the integrity of our election systems.”

Electronic voting vulnerabilities

Thankfully, the results themselves are not in danger of being misreported or miscalculated. Unlike, say, in the 2018 case of votes cast for Beto O’Rourke allegedly being changed to favor Ted Cruz on electronic voting machines, experts will be able to determine and verify the official Iowa caucus results because all the important stuff was done on paper.

Security experts have long warned that electronic voting machines with no paper trail are a risk to the election process. And yet, despite this known fact, we find ourselves putting our faith in electronic systems seemingly designed to fail. 

The 2018 O’Rourke/Cruz debacle is just one of many similar screw ups. As Politico noted in 2018, electronic votes cast for Democrat Stacey Abrams were allegedly changed to support her Republican opponent in the race for Georgia governor. 

These types of localized election errors have the capacity to be exponentially magnified when voting goes online. And, online it has gone. In 2018, Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization, released a report detailing just how widespread various forms of internet voting is. 

“[As] we receive regular warnings that our elections are the target of foreign adversaries, 32 states allow some subset of voters to return ballots by email, fax or internet portal,” reads the report. “For most states this is allowed only for military and overseas voters. However, in Alaska, all voters may vote absentee, and all absentee voters may return ballots electronically by fax.”

“We do not, at present, have the technology to offer a secure method to support Internet voting.”

According to researchers, emailed ballots are vulnerable to hacking and manipulation. In 2018, at the DEF CON hacking conference, security researchers Lyell Read and Daniel M. Zimmerman demonstrated their ability to easily change votes cast over the internet. 

“Read said he set up an ‘impostor server’ to mimic a real one that would normally route emails containing attached ballots,” reported McClatchy DC at the time. “On the rogue server, he inserted 30 or so lines of computer code, known as Bash shell script, to alter voters’ choices on ballots attached to emails in transit and to replace them with Read’s preferred candidates.”

In other words, this is a real issue that is long past the point of needing to be addressed. 

The expert advice

In a Tuesday press release, Warner echoed the calls of election security experts when it comes to the importance of paper trails. 

“As the Senate Intelligence Committee has repeatedly emphasized, paper ballots are the least vulnerable to cyberattack, and at a minimum, all voter machines should have a voter-verified paper trail,” he wrote. “What happened in Iowa last night underscores the necessity of all these measures were election-night systems to face a devastating hack.”

In 2018, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine published a detailed look into the state of the American election system. Titled “Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy,” the report hammered home what should be extremely clear to everyone by now. 

“We do not, at present, have the technology to offer a secure method to support Internet voting,” it read. 

Notably, the report also presciently addressed what would become a major point of concern not even two years later at the 2020 Iowa caucuses. 

“At the present time,” reads the report’s recommendations section, “the Internet (or any network connected to the Internet) should not be used for the return of marked ballots.”

Remember, this report was published in 2018. In 2020, the Iowa Democratic Party relied on an app to transmit caucus results over the internet. That app, for reasons that are still being investigated, failed. 

SEE ALSO: Experts warn smartphone voting is ‘extremely risky,’ yet here it comes

As the entire political class melts down over the delayed reporting of caucus results, it’s worth remembering two very important things: First, accurate vote tallies will be reported because they were recorded on paper. Second, it should never have come to this. 

But hey, it would seem not listening to experts is a bad habit that transcends party lines.