After Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested voting on iPhones this week, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the state’s chief elections officer, said he “aggressively” opposes Americans casting ballots via their mobile devices, calling the idea “preposterous.”
Brooke Singman for FOX Business:
“Not on my watch. Not in Ohio,” LaRose said Wednesday. “I think this is a classic example of one of these, kind of, elites, thinking they have a simple solution to a complex problem.”
Cook made the suggestion this week during an interview with The New York Times, calling America’s voting infrastructure “pretty arcane… I think we’re probably all having the wrong conversation on voting rights. We should be talking about using technology… We do our banking on phones. We have our health data on phones. We have more information on a phone about us than is in our houses. And so, why not?”
But LaRose said the “most important” thing with regard to elections is “public confidence,” and the confidence that “every vote is counted fairly and free of fraud and shenanigans… The public confidence is much harder, and lags behind technological competence.”
LaRose described the election process in Ohio, saying that “every ballot has a paper trail” which can be audited. LaRose touted Ohio’s election audit of having an accuracy rate of 99.98%… “The idea we would let people use iPhones or any other mobile device to do something as crucial as casting a ballot is just preposterous,” he said.
As for Cook, LaRose said he is “sure” his “intentions are probably good… He wants to see more participation. I want to see more participation,” LaRose said, saying “any patriotic person” would. “But trying something untested, like voting on iPhones — it [could] result in a loss of confidence.”
As for big tech companies in general, Republicans have criticized them for censoring conservative viewpoints. Just this week, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said he was investigating Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter for limiting conservative content.
“I share that concern,” LaRose said. “Because it is evident that there is a bias by a lot of these tech companies toward the left, and the whole cancel culture idea of censoring people whose opinions we disagree with is a really corrosive and dangerous thing.” He added: “Why would you want to allow those same individuals to have any control over the actual process of elections? That’s, again, why it is a terrible idea to have voting on iPhones.”
MacDailyNews Note: LaRose also said that there are “a lot of good things technology can do as it relates to running elections… but when it comes to actually casting ballots, tabulating results, that should never be connected to the internet — it should not be something that happens in an unverifiable measure.”