A mobile app designed to help ensure that Pennsylvania ballots are getting counted has already been rejected—by Apple itself, according to The Information.
After almost two weeks of holding up the release of the app, called Drive Turnout, The article says that Apple has told the developer behind it, Ari Steinberg, that the app violates the company’s privacy rules and that Apple won’t release it. Drive Turnout relies on information that’s publicly available on a Pennsylvania state website, which allows anyone with a voter’s name, date of birth and county of residence to verify that that voter’s ballot has been counted.
Here’s how Drive Turnout is described: Drive Turnout empowers you to make a difference this election. Even if you don’t live in a swing state, chances are, you probably know some people who do. We’ll help you find those people and make sure that their votes count.
The 2020 presidential election is likely to hinge on the state of Pennsylvania, so we’re focused there for now. Pennsylvania has complicated rules for mail-in ballots (search around for “naked ballots”), so if your friends aren’t careful, it would be easy to have their ballots not count. The NY Times ranked Pennsylvania as the battleground state most likely to have issues this year. You can help your friends out – you can look up the status of their ballots on the Pennsylvania web site and reach out to those who might be having trouble.
The Drive Turnout app helps you manage all this. We can help you keep track of which of your contacts are in PA, which ones have already voted successfully vs which ones you need to check up on, etc. You’re in full control of any communication you want to do with those people.d
The Drive Turnout app runs entirely on your phone – we only track anonymous usage information. No private information is shared back to our servers. The app facilitates access to your phone’s address book, your Facebook contacts, and the Pennsylvania state-wide system for ballot tracking, but none of this makes its way to us. We do track the voting status of your contacts, anonymously, as a way of measuring impact.
As far as the privacy of your contacts from you – all of the information presented in this app is already available to you publicly, the app merely serves as a way of helping you keep track of it all in one place.
