Despite these minor successes, criticism abounds over the trustworthiness of voting tech. Max Kaye, the Chief Technology Officer of SecureVote, says he hears the same arguments from the public about flawed designs of certain products. Kaye has spoken at conferences and engaged with political commentators over the idea, but has since drawn back from trying to persuade people.

“Technical arguments aren’t the best way to convince someone who isn’t technical,” Kaye says in a phone call. “It’s one of these problems where it’s much better to spend time creating a system that is robust by design and stands the test of battle than to particularly try to rebut people’s arguments too much because you end up spending a lot of time doing that instead of working on actually building things.”

In addition to the Iowa technology flop, MIT researchers released a report in February identifying major security vulnerabilities in Voatz’s technology indicating hackers could alter ballots and expose voters’ identities. Voatz responded to the research in a blog post, stating the study was based on an old version of their app. But the report and additional research from the Department of Homeland Security ultimately led West Virginia to abandon the voting app.

“No doubt there has been a lot of healthy and good questions coming from the academic, the advocate and the activist communities,” Finney says. “We embrace that because we want to work in collaboration with all of the different, interested parties.”

As tech leaders call for academics to work with them, Philip Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley, says he does work with cryptographers, but the field agrees remote voting isn’t secure.

“It isn’t that we aren’t willing to work with them,” Stark says. “In fact, we write white papers explaining the hard problems and why isn’t there no solution to this right now, and instead these people are just marketing stuff, lying about what it does, and hiding the implementation details to make it harder for people to understand the specific way in which it fails. So that’s really disingenuous.”

According to Stark and other experts, claims that online voting boosts voter engagement just aren’t true. Internet voting pilots in Canada and Hawaii didn’t increase participation. In some cases, voter turnout actually plummeted. “What raises turnout is exciting candidates who get people engaged,” Douglas W. Jones, computer scientist at the University of Iowa, says.

Stark believes the rise of voting technology startups is about profit—not accessibility. “People see an opportunity to sell a shiny, new product,” Stark says. “Election officials want to be perceived as progressive and adopting new technologies. The problem is what technology and for what purpose.” Stark adds that technology failures shouldn’t prevent people from casting their ballots—which is exactly what happened in Los Angeles County when voters were turned away from the polls because the new touch-screen system was missing required codes in order to operate.

And yet, Finney does want the nation to start thinking more strategically about voting, especially in circumstances where people can’t make it to polling stations because of emergencies like wildfires or disease outbreaks. Not only is there a need for this technology, but a greater desire for it.

Ultimately, whether or not you trust technology and politics mixing, things are shifting and such changes necessitate a need to be open to new ideas while remaining critical and urging transparency. “There’s going to be a new generation of voters demanding new generation voting technologies,” Finney says. And, as a new generation of voters who grew up online emerges, voting on your phone just makes sense.