A district that includes the greater Seattle area will soon have a chance to cast ballots by using a smartphone, NPR reports.
What’s going on: The King Conservation District — which includes more than 30 cities in Washington state, including Seattle — will soon announce a new plan that allows 1.2 million voters to cast a ballot using a smartphone, according to NPR.
- The smartphone ballot will be used during a board of supervisors election. Ballots will be accepted anytime from Wednesday through Feb. 11, which is election day.
- Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Philanthropies, called the move “the most fundamentally transformative reform you can do in democracy,” NPR reports.
- Tusk: “If you can use technology to exponentially increase turnout, then that will ultimately dictate how politicians behave on every issue.”
Why it matters: The move could change the way we vote in modern elections. But it could also be controversial.
- The Wall Street Journal: “The new option is likely to be controversial among computer security experts, many of whom have criticized it as too difficult to protect from tampering.”
- Duncan Buell, a computer science professor at the University of South Carolina, told Yahoo News: “There is a firm consensus in the cybersecurity community that mobile voting on a smartphone is a really stupid idea.”
- Buell: “... until we have a total collapse of some election, I think this sort of thing is going to continue.”
- Buell: “People want to believe that, you know, they can do everything on their phones.”
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How it works: Voters will use an online portal to jump in. They will use their name and birth date to register. They will sign a ballot using their device thereafter, according to Yahoo News. These ballots will then be printed.