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Microsoft Will Help Iowa Caucuses Go High-Tech
jfruh writes: Poltical party caucuses are one of the quirkier aspects of American political life: local party members gather in small rooms across the state, discuss their preferences, and send a report of how many delegates for each candidate will attend later county and statewide caucuses to ultimately choose delegates to the national convention. It's also a system with a lot of room for error in reporting, as local precinct leaders have traditionally sent in reports of votes via telephone touch-tone menus and paper mail. In 2016, Microsoft will help both Democrats and Republicans streamline the process in a fashion that will hopefully avoid the embarrassing result from 2012, when Mitt Romney was declared the winner on caucus night only for Rick Santorum to emerge as the true victor when all votes were counted weeks later.
This is a so-called solution that ignores the realities of the political process.
For one, in 2012, Ron Paul won Iowa, not Mitt Romney and not Rick Santorum.
The counted poll the article refers to is a just a straw poll, nothing more--the caucus itself, which happens afterwards, is what controls the selection of delegates. Folks who just voted in the straw poll and left before the caucus started didn't actually participate in caucusing for their candidate.
Sadly, the media reports these polls as if they were election/caucus results, and in 2012 mislead the public into thinking that Ron Paul, who was the winner in Iowa, somehow had no support even though he won Iowa.
Microsoft is now focusing on this irrelevant straw poll that doesn't represent the actual caucus results. But more importantly, even ignoring the fact that this straw poll doesn't actually have any real-world effect other than being useful as a way to mislead the public, listening to the video didn't answer any real questions about how their solution would really help even that process.
For instance, they talk about how the voting data (and they're talking about precinct and district level results for the unimportant straw polls), wouldn't be viewable to people in another political party. Well, if that's the case, how does anyone who participated in the straw poll verify that the totals were reported correctly? If that data is secret, then this is clearly a step in the wrong direction.
Then happens if there is a difference between the Microsoft-reported results and the paper mail reported results? If the mailed results take precedence, (which is ideal), then we're still back where we started--a correction to the straw poll is made weeks later. If the electronic results take precedence, then suddenly Microsoft is in control of the election.
I doubt they've put together a system that can be externally verified even in the presence of skilled bad actors at all levels. (ie, any vote counting system for political elections should be resilient against an attack of, say, all the designers, app store folks, and everyone at Microsoft related to the project working either individually or colluding together to give votes to a favored candidate. With a properly designed system, every single one of those people could be as nefarious as possible and vote rigging would still be detected.)
And..they talk about the "chair" being given credentials to report votes for his precinct/district, as if that has anything at all to do with the credentialing problem. So..how is that done specifically? Is Microsoft psychic? The chair isn't determined until a convention or a precinct begins--it's something that's voted on at the time.
So what happens if a different person is elected chair than the state party expects ahead of time? The vote totals for the straw poll are publicly known. A change of having those vote totals relayed via secure credentials given to a person the state party selects ahead of time (and who may or may not end up being the chair) and who may have a hidden agenda shared by the state party, isn't really a clear improvement over the same person relaying the very same, public information through a less secure channel and more error-prone channel.
In both cases we're completely dependent on there being external verifications of the process and in both cases we're screwed if those verifications don't happen.
So while it sounds all nice and shiny and such, and it will be nice that Microsoft is GPL'ing all the code to do this so that it can be adapted and used in any other project, (yes, I realize that isn't likely to be true--it will have either a proprietary license, or they'll try to pretend it is open-ish somehow), I don't see how it fundamentally solves any serious issue.