Voting via smartphone is 20 years away Travis County Clerk tells Californians

We're two decades away from voting from your smartphone, Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said at a computer security conference in California.

She wasn't talking about Season 38 of "American Idol." She meant subjecting the bedrock of our form of representative government to the supine nature of our telecommunications infrastructure. According to USA Today:

"When people stop me in the supermarket and ask, 'When am I going to be able to vote on my cell phone?' I say 'Pretty soon — in about 20 years.'"

Dana DeBeauvoir

Whether or not cell phones will exist in their current incarnation in the mid-2030s, voting now in 2016 is extremely subject to fraud, other speakers suggested at the same conference (Enigma 2016). Even DeBeauvoir said Internet voting currently lacks the ability to confirm ballots and is not yet safe.

And who knows what kind of government regulations on private telecom companies it would take to have voting-by-phone be considered "secure" to the satisfaction of federal regulators and judges?

The current unreliability of our balloting systems has been the battle cry of Dr. Laura Pressley, a former Austin City Council candidate and local activist who believes strongly that her results were tampered with.

More about Pressley's crusade in the courts as well as the court of public opinion can be read here and here. But according to a flyer distributed at the Travis County Republican Executive Committee Tuesday evening, she summarized the following "material mistakes and irregularities" in her runoff count:

1. More ballots than voters during early voting.
2. Mobile Ballot Box memory card corruption errors with the Tally main tabulation computer on election night.
3. Security breaches of electronic voter systems.
4. Extended log-ons of main election computers.
5. Obstructing official poll watchers from signing Results/Tally tapes.
6. Statistical analyses showing the vote tabulation is not credible.
7. Expert declaration regarding vote tabulation errors, etc. 

Dr. Laura Pressley

"Our legislature's system of election checks and balances must be restored for our 2016 elections," Pressley said.

Regardless of what comes of the investigation of Pressley's reported irregularities, the thought of moving to voting via personal mobile devices -- at least at this time -- is unfathomable. It may take more than 20 years to get there at the current rate of speed and barriers presented by the Help America Vote Act unless drastic action is taken to rebuild the system from the ground-up.

All that said: Would it kill anyone to just let us vote on a paper ballot like we used to?

Read more about the Enigma 2016 conference's panel on voting security at:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/01/28/internet-voting-not-ready-prime-time-security-risks/79456776