What is... Voatz?

The smartphone voting system uses the blockchain to secure votes, which has plenty of researchers worried. Perhaps the future of democracy still isn’t digital

The app that lets you vote on your smartphone.

Voatz is a smartphone app that uses biometrics to verify identity for “secure” voting. The startup’s technology has already been trialled in West Virginia primaries, and will also be used in the state for this year’s US midterm elections – albeit limited to soldiers serving overseas.

There’s been plenty of calls for digital votes — we’re all too lazy to take ten minutes to swing by the local polling station, apparently — but security concerns have largely held back such efforts. And imagine the chaos if an election was interfered with. Oh, wait…

How does Voatz work?

The startup says voting by paper “is frustrating and time consuming”. Its solution uses your smartphone, with voters not only verified by email, phone number and photo ID, but also by fingerprint and retinal scan. The vote is held on a blockchain, and not just any blockchain: one made on the Hyperledger framework, originally developed by IBM, that’s now been open-sourced to The Linux Foundation. “It makes fraud practically impossible,” a video on the Voatz site claims.

What are the security problems?

At its simplest, internet or mobile voting is fraught because it widens the “attack vector” — there are more ways for something to go wrong, more weak points to hack, and more potential victims. To meddle with paper ballots, you’d have to visit every polling station. If you’re interfering with a digital vote, one successful piece of malware could swing it. As a PC

Pro reader, you might be able to spot malware lying in wait on your phone, but would you gamble the next election on everyone keeping their smartphone secure?

We bank online, why not vote?

Banks keep records that track your transactions against your name, so you can query any activity later. But because elections require a secret vote, there’s no way for an individual to check their vote was correctly cast after the fact.

At least it saves on paper, right?

Not quite. For a previous, smaller pilot in West Virginia, each smartphone vote was printed out onto paper and counted like a mail-in ballot, to create a paper trail for auditing purposes. We can imagine a similar routine in the future.

What other challenges are there?

To vote in the UK, you don’t need to present a photo ID. While there have been calls to require that, amid concerns of voter fraud (which is rare), doing so could disenfranchise groups of people less likely to have a passport or a driver’s licence. Plus, while the majority of Brits have smartphones, some don’t, and Voatz only works with smartphones that have “the latest security features”. If your grandma is on an ancient Android, she may well not be able to vote.

Where could this be useful?

Given what’s at stake, perhaps public votes for political leaders isn’t the best use case for Voatz. But it may be useful for ballots that are less likely to be targeted by hackers. The company suggests it could be used for university elections or shareholder meetings or, as is the case in West Virginia, for overseas voters such as soldiers. Those might be less risky places to trial such an idea, without the potential fallout that would come with messing up a national election.