The letter below was sent to Defense Secretary Esper. If you’re interested in helping to enable mobile voting for all military this fall, get in touch.
Text of the letter
Voatz
50 Milk St, 11th Floor, Boston MA 02109 USA
https://voatz.com – info@voatz.com
Dr. Mark T. Esper
Secretary of Defense
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington, D.C. 20301-1000
June 26, 2020
RE: Mobile Voting
Dear Secretary Esper,
We thank you for your leadership in bringing focus to cybersecurity as a critical domain in our country’s defense, and the need for proactive responses to preserve the integrity of our national security.
At Voatz, making voting accessible for everyone drives everything we do. We care deeply about those who cannot or who are challenged to vote in person or on paper, specifically our deployed military servicepeople, overseas citizens, and voters with disabilities. As you are aware, despite several prior efforts, our military service members serving overseas continue to rely upon mail, email, and fax to vote. These methods present significant obstacles, are not secure, and do not ensure the right to a private ballot. This group continues to vote at a rate of 7 percent—one of the most disenfranchised in the country.
We support your call for “Defense Forward”. However, in this age, there is a significant mismatch between this call and the way our overseas military service members vote, especially when compared to America’s technology leadership in every other sector. In the time of coronavirus, most Americans seamlessly transitioned to working from home without missing a beat, powered by American innovation; at exactly the same time we expect members of our military to continue to use unreliable global mail and fax, even as the U.S. Postal Service no longer carries mail to roughly eighty-five countries as of June 23, 2020. It is disheartening to note that when it comes to a secure access to the vote, America has placed little to no faith in technology.
In times like these we should not require our service members to compromise their basic right to a vote and to a secret ballot. Rather, we should reaffirm our commitment to protecting those rights. Voatz was designed with this in mind, and believes the technology exists today to secure these rights. Prior efforts at e-voting did not result in a solution because these projects were abandoned prematurely for fear of failure or executed poorly for lack of resources.
This time is different.
For the last five years, Voatz has been working to pioneer accessible, secure, and auditable technology that provides access for those who can’t get to the polls, or for whom paper ballots don’t work. In order to do this, we leverage the latest security features of smartphones, like Apple and Android, the phones that many of us use, along with facial recognition technology to verify and validate the identity of the voter. As such, the building blocks of our security rest upon the very well-tested, vetted strength of several American companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. We leverage biometrics to secure and protect that voter’s identity, and we automatically produce a paper ballot for tabulation at the jurisdiction. Lastly, we use a blockchain-based tamper resistant ledger to secure the aggregate vote and to enable rigorous post-election audits so that we can ensure voter intent is reflected in the overall count without revealing voter identity.
We have run 66 elections since 2016, including 11 targeted, well-designed governmental election pilots across five states for deployed military personnel, overseas voters and voters with disabilities, with no issues in the tabulation or integrity of votes. These governmental pilots have all been declared successes by the jurisdictions, and many of the voters who’ve used the system have shared valuable feedback about how this voting option made participation accessible for them.
For some, this was the first time voting in decades.
We feel a duty to be a clear resource during these times. Mobile voting holds the best promise to improve accessibility, security and resilience for overseas military voters.
If called up by your esteemed office and the DOD, Voatz welcomes the opportunity to draw upon our experience, engineering and technology expertise to help execute a mobile voting solution to make it easy for military service members to vote through a trusted, secure platform that ensures the right to a private vote.
We appreciate your time and attention to the protection of the right to vote and upholding the right to a secret ballot.
Sincerely,
Nimit Sawhney
Co-founder and CEO
Voatz