The Iowa app fiasco could stand as a parable of our jerry-built political system—the worst-case scenario of what happens when the inflated value of rural outliers meets the half-baked infatuation with high technology. Investing hundreds of millions of dollars into security—then doing it again every four or eight years after hackers find a way around your new wall—is a mug’s game. It is as yet unknown how the Iowa Democratic Party—an independent fiefdom that functions quite separately from the national committee and quite full of its outsize importance—hired the company called Shadow to create the app for reporting the caucus tallies from the state’s remote precincts Monday night. But a survey of a half-dozen heavyweights in the cybersecurity field suggests the firm is not a known quantity. Go back to paper ballots—not just for caucuses and primaries, but for general elections.
At slate.com
