Page 24 - FCW, August 2019

Voting Security
Many election officials, election technology companies and voting rights advocates support a phone-based system to make voting easier for millions of Americans. But the convenience of voting by phone comes with risks.
to a National Conference of State Legis- latures analysis last year. But that prac- tice can be risky. Emails can be inter- cepted, and voters forfeit their privacy by sending their completed ballots to a county official.
Nix is now president of Tusk Philan- thropies, which funds mobile voting ini- tiatives in states. One of the initiatives it supports is Voatz, a Boston-based com- pany that has developed a voting app for Apple and Android phones. The app uses blockchain technology — a series of redundant, geographically dispersed and hard-to-hack servers that can store votes. West Virginia was the first state to use the smartphone app for military voters overseas.
When he was in Afghanistan for five years, West Virginia GOP Secretary of State Mac Warner couldn’t vote in the 2012 and 2014 elections. He understood there were security concerns to an inter- net-based system, said Mike Queen, Warner’s deputy chief of staff and com- munications director, but thought get- ting ballots to service members who don’t have regular access to the mail was worth the risk.
“You know the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t show up in Beirut or Iraq or Afghanistan,” Queen said.
After receiving a proposal from Voatz, West Virginia officials agreed to try the app. In the May 2018 elections, the state tested the system with fewer than 20 voters in two of the state’s 55 counties.
In its second pilot during the Novem- ber midterms, the state opened the pro- cess to 24 counties and 144 West Vir- ginians who voted from 30 countries, including Japan, Kuwait and Uganda. State officials audited every vote after the election.
Warner hopes to include every coun- ty by the next presidential election. However, he wants to limit use of the app to overseas military voters.
After West Virginia’s success, city officials in Denver this year allowed service members and their families liv- ing abroad to vote in May’s municipal elections using the Voatz app. Denver officials opened the audit process to members of the public, who were able to verify the accuracy of the voting. Officials also hosted a Facebook Live demonstration of its post-election audit.
Balancing privacy, security and access
Leaders at Voatz say they have gone to great lengths to ensure their app is secure. After downloading the app from
Apple or Google store, eligible voters can access their ballots by scanning both sides of their driver’s licenses using their phones’ cameras. Voters use facial recognition software to take a 10-sec- ond video of their faces, blinking and moving their heads slightly. Their fin- gerprints on the phones’ home button confirm their identity.
After the voting is complete, voters receive a password-protected email attachment with their vote receipt, which self-corrupts after a certain period. Counties receive a completed ballot with an anonymous identification number that is ready to be printed and counted with other ballots by creden- tialed election officials. The encrypted vote is transmitted to 32 blockchain servers, hosted by Amazon and Micro- soft, in several locations throughout the country.
To run post-election audits, the com- pany partnered with ShiftState Security in West Virginia and with the Colorado- based National Cybersecurity Center in Denver. To find potential security weaknesses in its software, the com- pany partnered with the Department of Homeland Security and the online com- munity HackerOne. Voatz is expected to release white papers about its security
20 August 2019 FCW.COM