Smart Government programs can learn from the Iowa Caucuses fiasco to deliver tested, secure and useable apps their citizens need.

By Xische Editorial, February 10, 2020

For better or worse, the smartphone ecosystem is a walled garden. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems are designed to protect users from malicious programmes and complicated programming language. They are also made to be intuitive. If you have ever seen a toddler use an iPhone, the design success is abundantly clear. Because of the strength of these products, we have come to expect smartphone applications to be vetted, operational, and easy to manage. But it’s not foolproof. The Iowa caucuses voting fiasco is a case in point. 

Let’s review the facts. The first primary of the United States presidential election kicked off last week for the Democratic party in Iowa. Eager to demonstrate an innovative approach to technology in this election, the Iowa Democratic Party unveiled a new application that was designed to speed up election day reporting and streamline the entire process. The app was billed as a step towards digital voting, where citizens will simply cast their votes from phones and results will instantly be tallied. Instead, nearly everything about the application went contrary to how most people use their smartphone apps. No wonder it crashed on election day.

Problems with the Iowa Caucus app, which was designed by a company called Shadow, began from the start. The app wasn’t available for testing before the election and few officials were given sufficient training on how to use it properly. Even the process for downloading the app was unfamiliar. Instead of going to the app store and grabbing the app the way everyone is used too, the Iowa app was hosted on a special beta testing platform known as TestFlight in iOS. For the average smartphone user, this step is already one too many. How many people have even heard of TestFlight? 

If you were able to download the app, the process of authentication was equally as complicated. Users required a pin, password and two-factor authentication code, all of which were the same length. These design mishaps were the first cracks in a complete breakdown in the reporting process. As of this writing, more than a week after the voting has finished, there are still no final results. One wonders why there was no paper backup to enable another way to count votes, but that is a topic for another day. 

The breakdown of the Iowa Caucus application has important lessons far beyond the US presidential election. We have grown accustomed to the walled gardens of our online existence. Some might complain about Apple’s control over its products but the result of that control is that we can trust applications to work. Apple ensures that the process of selecting and downloading apps is straightforward and seamless. In effect, iOS (and Android, to a lesser extent) facilitates a vast awareness campaign about how to use its services. And it has been remarkably successful. 

As more services go online, awareness campaigns about how they work are doubly important. Administrators can’t simply hope that average people are tech literate, or have the patience to learn a new user journey. This has special relevance for the UAE and other countries that are moving services to an application-based and digital model. Last month, for example, Abu Dhabi announced that more than 3 million medical records will be available through a new application. The announcement is part of a digital overhaul that will give patients and doctors more control over their medical information.  

Such services, when used properly, will dramatically transform how we live our lives. Services will be delivered more efficiently and people will have more time to focus on aspects of their lives that truly matter. Yet, as the Iowa debacle highlights, we have our work cut out to reach this stage. Without awareness on behalf of the consumer and administrators, these models won’t deliver the promises we all hope for. 

One way to solve some of the issues presented by the Iowa situation is for administrators and governments to invest in creating lasting technology that remains sticky over time. Instead of creating an app for each voting state in the US presidential election, for example, why not create one universal version. That way, users only have to learn the material once, while developments benefit from a larger pool interaction data to refine the app experience. Single-use solutions should be thoroughly examined to ensure it is providing a solution to a necessary challenge. 

It goes without saying that security is foundational to all digital products and services. The efficient way of achieving strong operational security is through transparency and simplicity. More complex systems necessarily have more pressure points that can lead to security issues. Good applications take time to build, and require advanced testing to detect and resolve bugs or flaws before widespread release. We can learn from the Iowa episode but it’s up to us to ensure that we take steps to ensure that the next round of critical applications is better than the last.