Voters across Seattle’s King County can now cast ballots via smartphone.
This historic moment for American democracy comes with a catch, though.
Online voting is available only for the King Conservation District Board of Supervisors election—a contest “so obscure,” the Seattle Times explained, voters must specifically request a ballot.
King Conservation District elections typically draw voter turnout of no more than three percent, according to the paper.
Polls are now open: Use your name and birthdate to log into the Democracy Live web portal through a mobile browser. Once the ballot is complete, verify your submission and sign the screen.
Electronic entries returned by 8 p.m. PT on Feb. 11 (election day) will be printed and counted toward the final tally.
“This is the most fundamentally transformative reform you can do in democracy,” Bradley Tusk, founder and CEO of Tusk Philanthropies, a nonprofit working with the county to implement this mobile voting pilot.
Mobile voting dates back to May 2018, when the Voatz app opened to two counties in West Virginia for initial testing of the technology.
Following a successful pilot, the option was extended to military and overseas voters during the November 2018 general election, and then during the May 2019 Denver municipal poll.
Utah and Oregon followed suit, and by the end of last year had implemented mobile voting pilots in their respective states.
The KCD in Washington marks the first time mobile voting is available to all eligible registered constituents.
“This election could be a key step in moving toward electronic access and return for voters across the region,” King County Director of Elections Julie Wise told the Times.
The polarizing move, as NPR pointed out, will likely fan the flames of controversy regarding voting access-versus-voting security.
While the U.S. lags far behind most developed democracies in terms of election turnout rates, digital voting technology has let the country down before. (Russian cyberattacks, anyone?)
“There’s a lot of things we do online—banking, health records—that are also of concern for people that are secure,” Wise said. “I’ve vetted this, technology experts in the region have vetted this to ensure that this is a safe, secure voting opportunity.”
Specialists, however, have warned against mobile voting, arguing that technology has not yet advanced enough, and that the internet will “never be safe or transparent enough for something as important as democracy,” NPR reported.
But that won’t stop Tusk Philanthropies, which is determined to step into the future of voting—no matter how much convincing it takes.
“Everyone who doesn’t want this to happen is never going to say, ‘We oppose mobile voting because we don’t want higher turnout,’” company chief Tusk said. “They’re going to say, ‘It’s not safe.’ And if we have proven 30, 40, 50 times over that it is safe, it’s a lot harder for those objections and arguments to fly.”
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