West Virginia has begun accepting absentee ballots cast in this fall’s general election via a smartphone app, marking a first in U.S. general elections. The app, built by Voatz, a startup based in Boston, uses blockchain technology along with features on voter’s smartphone to try to ensure the identity of the voter and the integrity of the vote.
West Virginia is targeting the app for use by residents who are overseas, in particular members of the military to use the app in this year’s general election, according to an article in Slate.
“The hardships that our overseas servicemen and women have in voting and returning a ballot are much greater than those that we see in the state,” West Virginia elections director Donald Kersey told The Washington Post.
According to Voatz, the app will work on recently-manufactured smartphone models from Apple, Samsung and Google that include security features, such as fingerprint and facial recognition. These devices provide hardware-based security to store private keys that allow highly secure, encrypted transactions to be conducted over the public Internet. Votes will be stored on a permissioned blockchain that will eventually be controlled by stakeholders such as state elections officials so that votes can’t be changed.
What is blockchain technology? Blockchain is a digital ledger — a log of transactions. The ledger is shared across a network of computers, and transactions are recorded onto the ledger only if the computers on the blockchain network reach consensus on the validity of the transaction. Transactions are logged on the ledger as part of a block, and the blocks are strung together in a chain, with each including a reference to the preceding block – thus the name “blockchain.” It’s the same technology that powers Bitcoin and other “cryptocurrencies.”
Votes cast via the Voatz app could play a critical role in determining not only the outcome of races in West Virginia, including the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin and Republican challenger Patrick Morrisey, but also control of the U.S.Senate. The West Virginia Senate race is close. Although most polls have shown Manchin holding a reasonably comfortable lead, the most recent poll published on the FiveThirtyEight website shows the race is tied, with each candidate at 45%. Republicans hold a slim, 51-49 majority in the U.S. Senate, and with several close races across the country, “the race for control of the Senate is as tight as it can be.”
Some are raising questions about Voatz’ security practices and more generally the security and integrity of using a smartphone app for voting. Security blogger Kevin Beaumont alleged numerous issues with Voatz in a series of Tweets. Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CNN, “Mobile voting is a horrific idea. It’s internet voting on people’s horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote.”
For its part, Voatz responded to specific security concerns in detail, noting:
The Voatz platform goes to significant lengths to prevent a vote from being submitted if a device is compromised. Only certain classes of smartphones that are equipped with the latest security features are allowed to be used. Detecting a compromised mobile network is particularly challenging for a mobile application, which is why ensuring end-to-end vote encryption and vetting the certificates represented by unique IDs stored on the smartphone, are two of the approaches we use to mitigate a compromised mobile network.
Although critics have raised concerns about the implementation in West Virginia, blockchain technology will almost certainly play a role in voting, beyond the small-scale rollout in in the Mountaineer State. The tamper-resistance of records stored on the blockchain, particularly when combined with biometric features on modern smartphones make it a promising solution to make it easier for voters to cast their ballots.
“There have been a number of proposals to use blockchains for voting,” Vipul Goyal, associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University told ZDNet. “It’s an active and exciting area of research. Certainly it seems like blockchains bring some missing components to make online voting a reality.”
