Category: Elections

When you vote, do you trust that your vote is counted? If you mail an absentee ballot, how do you know that it’s been received and counted accurately?

Our mission is to make voting not only more accessible and secure, but also more transparent, auditable and accountable.

How do we do that?

We’ve built a way for voting to happen on the thing that many of you carry around in your pocket each day — your smartphone.

Here, we share how it works for you, as the voter, to vote with your smartphone, how you can verify that your vote was counted, and how your Election Office can verify that all ballots are legitimate, reflect the voter’s intent, and are tallied correctly.

STEP 1: ENROLLING TO VOTE WITH YOUR SMARTPHONE

First, why the smartphone? Your smartphone contains security features that, even five years ago, didn’t exist. These enhancements cast a wide and valuable infrastructural net that we build on in order to ensure that we’re protecting your privacy and data with the highest standards.

These security features also allow us to ensure that one voter’s identity is linked to only one smartphone at a time in order to prevent you from voting more than once, and to prevent anyone from voting on your behalf.

The process looks like this, also outlined in the diagram above:

1. You register with your jurisdiction as an absentee voter and, upon approval, download the Voatz app.
2. You use the Voatz app to verify your identity against the voter registration database, and upon confirmation, your identity is linked to your smartphone and locked with your pseudo-biometric credential (such as FaceID, TouchID, etc) or unique PIN.
3. When done, any identification documents you provide during the verification process are deleted, and not shared with anyone else.

What’s next?

 

STEP 2: YOU VOTE WITH YOUR SMARTPHONE

Once you’re verified, you receive your mobile ballot inside Voatz on your smartphone, make your selections, sign an affidavit on the screen (~subject to your jurisdictional requirements), authorize submission of the ballot with your pseudo-biometric credential or PIN, and then submit. 

Congrats! You’ve voted. Now, here’s where things get interesting from an audit perspective.

 

STEP 3: VERIFY, AUDIT & CONFIRM YOUR VOTE

The moment you vote, three important records are produced:

1. A ballot receipt is sent to you, and an anonymized copy is sent to your jurisdiction. It’s protected, and signed with a digital ID (a long string of characters and numbers). With this receipt, you gain the ability to verify that your ballot was received and recorded correctly.
2. Your votes are stored as “vote transactions” (think: one oval on your ballot = one vote transaction). They’re anonymized and cryptographically written onto a blockchain network. This allows your overall ballot to be stored in a uniquely tamper-resistant way, and allows your jurisdiction (and interested citizens) to conduct a transparent (yet anonymous) audit after the election.
3. An official, fully-marked paper ballot is generated for your mobile vote, and printed on ballot paper by your jurisdiction. This paper ballot is immediately ready for seamless tabulation with the normally-used tabulator machines on Election Day, alongside the rest of the ballots people submit at the polls. This paper ballot is also signed with an anonymous digital ID similar to the ballot receipt, which allows your jurisdiction to compare the two during a post-election audit.

In the diagram you can view these three records, where they go and why:

This process enables a fully verifiable paper trail for each submitted ballot.

You remain anonymous, your data remains protected, the tabulation integrates with your jurisdiction’s current operations, and all ballots contain three trails for auditing to ensure all votes were counted as cast. 

Mostly, you get to vote with convenience without compromising security.

Here’s the full process, put together:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Questions? Get in touch.

XI’AN, CHINA — Michael Graney lives in Xi’an, a large city smack dab in the middle of Shaanxi, China.

With bustling streets, air thick with pollution and mountains just visible through the haze, Xi’an is one of China’s oldest cities, an important cultural, industrial and educational epicenter.

Michael is in his third year as a graduate student, here, studying Chinese sociology and culture. He lives in a small studio with wooden floors, wallpapered walls, sporadic electricity and a humble, all-in-one bathroom with a laundry machine.

He spends most days on the move teaching, writing his thesis, or engaging with his community — air pollution permitting.

^Michael at a farm in Xi’an, China

Michael grew up on the opposite end of the world in Charleston, West Virginia. Raised in a small capital city, early on Michael witnessed the power of politics and local community engagement.

“Even if you didn’t know the decision-makers, you saw them in the community,” Michael says, slightly chuckling, “in West Virginia, everyone always says ‘you can talk about anything except politics — that’s personal.’”

These early experiences have clearly shaped Michael’s connection to community and civic duty, along with his parents’ dedication to taking him and his brothers on trips around the world as kids, valuing exposure to perspectives different than “American”.

“Understanding where other people are coming from and holding an appreciation for other cultures is something I’ve always valued, will always carry with me,” says Michael. “I’ve always been drawn to learn about people.”

^Michael with friends sharing tea in Xi’an, China

In an interesting way, Michael’s home turf in West Virginia mirrors his current reality in China: a capital city surrounded by largely rural communities, or, significant pockets of development surrounded by sprawling landscapes of relative poverty.

Despite this curious similarity, in other ways the two places couldn’t be more different: one is located in a country that prioritizes the individual, is shaped by political goings-on and an engaged community sentiment.

The other is directed by a deep-rooted tradition that places priority on the collective, is governed by hierarchy and an at-times opaque rank-and-file order.

“Here in China, power is pretty much top-down. They have elections at the very local grassroots level in villages, but from then on, people are appointed, work through the ranks, and apply to politics like you’d apply to any other job.”

The idea of citizens “rights” are also of a different flavor in China.

“A friend recently asked me whether we learned about our rights in school and I said yes. For him, that doesn’t happen. It made me appreciate the U.S. constitution, that we have rights, and that they’re even taught to us. It made me appreciate that so many years ago when the constitution was written there might’ve been an opportunity to take advantage of that, but people didn’t.

“In the U.S., if I get pulled over for going too fast, I have a process to contest that, if I want. There’s rule of law, even if I don’t like when I have to pay parking tickets.

“That sort of transparency is what comes from voting.”

^Michael with friends in the mountains in Xi’an, China

So when it came time to vote in the 2018 U.S. Midterms, this backdrop — China — served as an interesting setting for Michael.

“Voting is one of those things you always know is a privilege and a civic duty, but now living in a place where people can’t vote, it just means so much more. Not only is the government accountable, they’re accountable to me, to us.”

Despite being far away, Michael has remained closely connected to the issues happening back home.

“I read The Economist every week, I still read the Charleston Gazette, and I talk to my parents about what’s happening back home in West Virginia.”

^Michael with fellow students in Xi’an, China

As a “UOCAVA voter” — a voter classified as living overseas or a member of the uniformed military — Michael’s options to vote in the Midterms were either by mail, fax, or email.

These voting options required him to print a paper ballot, fill it out and entrust a nearly 10,000 mile journey to arrive in time, or to send a ballot via email for his County Clerk to replicate by hand, relinquishing his right to privacy.

“When I was in college in Virginia, I voted absentee by mail, and, you know, I’m fairly sure it got there from Virginia to West Virginia, but on time? From China to West Virginia, that concern increases.”

^Michael lives in Xi’an, China, nearly 10,000 miles from his home in Charleston, West Virginia

Just before the 2018 Midterms, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner announced a first-of-its-kind mobile voting pilot that would enable overseas voters to vote in a new way — with their smartphones.

Michael happened to live in one of the 24 participating counties and was eligible to participate. He let his County know, downloaded the Voatz app, and verified his identity against the State Voter Registration Database.

“The identity process wasn’t bad — it took my face, then my license — that part was easiest.”

^Michael voted using Voatz on his smartphone in his apartment in Xi’an China

From there, Michael received his mobile ballot.

“Every time I logged into the app it recognized my face right away. It felt good to be able to have the time to view my ballot and go and research my choices before voting — I did that for the City Council race.”

Once he was ready, “I voted pretty much right away. I was in my apartment, at the end of the school day, and I turned on my VPN, even though I probably didn’t need to just because you know — I guess I’ve always thought of voting as a private and I wanted privacy. That was my sort of 20th century version of a plastic booth with a curtain — a virtual curtain.”

“I felt secure because it was explained to me well before starting — with the blockchain technology and getting the ballot receipt to verify my choices.

“Mostly, having voted with Voatz, I know it got there more than on time, and that it was counted early.”

What about the future?

“In this global world where people live far and wide, I think it’s important that we can still maintain our civic duty. I’m very proud that West Virginia is the first — sometimes it is hard to get to the polls whether you’re at work or in China. It’s important we all have the opportunity to vote legitimately and safely.”

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Contributions:
Michael Graney

VICENZA, ITALY — Scott Warner stares out the window, 1,200 feet above the ground, loud jet engines whirring in the background and wide expanse of earth stretching out along the distant, hazy horizon.

Like a cavity in the bottom of a canyon, trees, specs of cattle, grasslands and hills pass by, peacefully threaded together by roads and waterways, woven together into the quiet makeup of a quilted landscape.

Warner yells to his comrades and, in the midst of the commotion, catches a moment — here they are, all of them, floating above the surface and hovering, miraculously, in these moments between space and time.

“WOOSH!”

Suddenly the door opens and a deafening burst of air rushes into the plane, alerting the paratroopers that it’s nearly game time. The aircraft banks, Warner steadies himself with his static line, already hooked up to the cable running the length of the aircraft.

He stares at his comrades, feeling the exhilarating force of the whirling air and before he can think, he’s at the door.

“STAND BY!”

Pack strapped on back, helmet buckled tightly beneath chin, Warner hands off his static line and silently counts down.

3…2…

“GREEN LIGHT… GO!”

And he’s off, with a slap from the jumpmaster and the full strength of his body, launching out the door, jostled by the blast of wind, and catapulting into the abyss beneath with only a string, pack and a parachute — God willing — to carry him safely down.

 

^Captain Scott Warner lives in Vicenza, Italy

 

This is Warner’s world, and his life is not his own. Laid at the feet of duty, Warner has signed up for a life of service and thrown his heart into the ring like so many before, feeling the pull of the call.

“My whole family has served in some form — sisters, brother, dad, uncles, cousins, grandfathers.”

Indeed, Warner comes from a long lineage of service. Both grandfathers served in the army, his paternal grandfather from 1944-1946 with another 13 years between ROTC and the reserves. His maternal grandfather served 15 years, split between active duty and the reserves. His dad, now Secretary of State in West Virginia, graduated from the United States Military Academy and served for 23 years. His older brother and sister also graduated from West Point and served in the Army.

But Warner, a young man full of calm conviction, made the decision to join on his own.

“I grew up being raised with two values at the forefront — faith and service. I’d always known about the Army from so many in my family having joined, but my parents never tried to force it on me. In fact, if they had I probably would’ve done the opposite.

“When I applied to West Point I prayed about it, felt a sense of peace and adventure about it, and decided, ‘Yeah, this is right for me.’”

 

^A legacy of service (from left): Secretary of State Mac Warner, Brother (Steven), Mother (Debbie), Captain Scott Warner

 

Warner just entered his fifth year in service and was recently promoted to the rank of “Captain”. Currently stationed in Italy, he works on a military base but spends most days at the whim of a paratrooper’s schedule, whether traveling to countless countries for training or jumping from jets.

“I’ve definitely had my moments. You know, when it’s 2:00AM, you’re standing in the middle of the German wilderness in late October and it’s sleeting and raining and just awful outside, it’s hard to not ask yourself, “Why in the world am I doing this?”

“But what keeps me going are the relationships. My parents always taught us that no matter where you go or what you do, it’s the people you meet and the relationships you form that truly matter. I’ve definitely found that to be true. Being there for my buddies and for my Soldiers is what keeps me motivated to keep pushing.”

For Warner, faith, a deep sense of connection and purpose have always been guiding forces — both in the way he navigates his commitment to service, and also how he considers his duties as a citizen.

“My parents have always been engaged with politics, and they wanted to make sure we understood the underlying framework so we could educate ourselves and vote.”

Warner and his siblings grew up going to Camp Lincoln, a summer camp where kids learn about the U.S. two-party system, build leadership skills for the future and participate in a mock model congress.

“Growing up, I definitely knew voting and politics mattered. I knew it was important to know who we were electing, who was forming our laws and controlling our government. And I understood that if I wanted to have a say, I’d have to voice it at the ballot box.”

 

^Captain Warner with his parents (Secretary of State Mac Warner and Mrs. Debbie Warner)

 

When Warner was in school at West Point, he didn’t vote — the registration logistics of being in a new state and at military school were admittedly too cumbersome amidst the demanding schedule.

Now, serving overseas in the military where the only options to vote are via mail, fax, or email, and where Warner is at the whim of his training schedule, voting might have also posed a challenge.

 

 

But early in 2018, Warner’s dad — West Virginia’s Secretary of State — phoned him up. He was excited, and he had an idea.

“I remember when my Dad started telling me about it — he’d always been passionate about getting voter registration cleaned up across the state,” Warner said.

“He told me about how he was trying to work toward making it easier for out of state voters (particularly military service members) to vote — ‘to make it easy to vote but hard to cheat’. For me, for him, for all of our family and those in the army, this was a big deal.”

In early 2018, Secretary of State Mac Warner — Scott Warner’s father — launched a small pilot with just two counties in West Virginia for the primaries in March. Overseas citizens, military and their dependents from these two counties would be able to vote using their smartphones with the Voatz application.

 

^Captain Warner

 

Scott Warner was the first, ever, to vote in a U.S. Federal Election using a smartphone backed by blockchain technology, and he did so on March 18, 2018 from Vicenza, Italy. He’d completed an airborne operation earlier that day, went home, downloaded the app, verified his identity, and made his selections.

“The whole thing was pretty simple. It still took a little bit of back and forth to get registered, but once I got the app downloaded and my account verified, I remembered thinking it was very intuitive, easy to use, and easy to make my selections. I also thought it was a cool use of facial recognition technology to verify my identity by matching me to my government issued ID.”

For Warner, the biggest help was to doing it on his own time.

“In any given week I have a lot going on. Today, we’re on an airborne operation and I could be back at a reasonable hour, or the weather could change and our timeline could get pushed late into the night. Our schedules are pretty chaotic.

“To not have to keep coming back to a process — like getting an application, receiving that, mailing this, postmarking by this date — is key. If it’s a multistep process with days in-between the steps, it’s so easy to do the first few parts, leave for training, and forget the last bit.

“So to be able to knock out voting on your own time and all at once — that’s pretty sweet. It was significantly easier than my alternatives.”

For Warner, the added benefit, too, was preserving his anonymity.

“When you’re mailing or emailing your ballot, you lose that anonymity, but with this, my choices remain anonymous — that was extremely important.”

Later in 2018, when Secretary Warner opened mobile voting to 24 counties for the Midterms, Warner voted again.

“When I told my peers and colleagues about voting with my smartphone, they were impressed and jealous. They wanted to know how I did it and wished they could do the same. I felt proud I could brag about West Virginia leading the way.

“In the end, democracy only works if you actually get the full cross-section of the population to participate. If our voting system only turns out 40-50%, then we’re missing a huge part of the population. If we do everything through our phones — credit card transactions, healthcare — why not use them to encourage greater participation?

“It’s important to maintain the freedom we have, and the point of democracy is getting the input of all people. Why not try to make it work?”

 

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Contributions:
We thank Scott Warner for his contributions to this piece.

DENVER, CO — Two weeks ago, the City of Denver closed the polls for its Municipal elections. For the first time, it ran a pilot program with Voatz to allow overseas citizens, military personnel and their dependents to vote from their mobile devices.

Military voters and citizens around the world were able to download the Voatz app, use their mobile devices to verify their identity, securely and anonymously cast their votes, and verify that their vote was counted correctly.

 

What is an audit?

A post-election audit is a process to ensure that the equipment and procedures used to count votes during an election worked properly, and that the election yielded the correct outcome.

In the case of Denver’s pilot with Voatz, to ensure integrity in the vote transmission process, every ballot submitted through the Voatz system generated three records to facilitate a robust post-election audit (see Figure 1):

^Figure 1: Three records are produced at the time of voting to facilitate a rigorous post-election audit

 

1. A Voter-Verified Digital Receipt (VVDR), signed with an Anonymous ID (AnonID), is sent to the voter at the time of voting to verify her selections (and copied to the jurisdiction)
2. A Tabulated Ballot, formatted for printing, is tabulated on Election Day using the jurisdiction’s voting machines (signed with same AnonID)
3. The Blockchain Records of the votes are stored as “transactions” and bundled as blocks on the blockchain

 

The City of Denver ran an unprecedented post-election audit at the close of the Election, which was open to the public and used these three ballot records to verify the flow of information and accuracy in every step of ballot submission and transmission.

Information was verified from the voter’s device to the blockchain, from the blockchain to the ballot, and from the ballot to the tabulation system, confirming that there was no malfeasance, interruption, or disruption of data.

 

How does the audit work?

The audit has three steps, which correspond to the three records produced by each ballot:

1)   Verify that the anonymous IDs match between the Voter-Verified Digital Receipt (VVDRs) and the tabulated ballot

^Image showing the match between the Anonymous IDs signed on both documents.

 

2)   Once anonymous IDs are verified, verify the selections between the VVDR, tabulated ballot, and the jurisdiction’s tabulation export

^Image showing the comparison between the Voter-Verified Digital Receipt (middle pane), sent to the voter upon submission to verify her choices and copied to the jurisdiction, and the ballot printed on Election Day for tabulation. Both contain the same Anonymous ID and selections.

 

3)   Verify that the vote transactions stored on the blockchain match the VVDR selections

^Image showing the comparison between the Voter Verified Digital Receipt choices and the data on the blockchain. Each ballot’s choices are stored as “transactions”, bundled across multiple blocks. Each transaction (UUID) corresponds to a choice.

 

What’s it like to conduct an audit?

Several independent third party auditors signed up to complete the audit. Here are reflections from three students who conducted the audit.

Orlando Alomá, Postgraduate at Hult International Business School

My name is Orlando Alomá and I am a postgraduate student at Hult International Business School in Cambridge, MA. I come from a finance background and my passion is to research and learn how startups work and grow.

The audit is a manual process that requires great attention to detail and concentration. There were 119 ballots that needed to be verified through the audit process and it took me about four days to complete it. This was my first audit experience ever, so I had no idea what to expect at the beginning. Luckily, the steps and process of the audit are easy and well-explained in instructional slides and a video. After watching the video, it was clear to me that the audit was going to be an easy but time-consuming task.

Performing the audit is an excellent way to get to understand how the Voatz system works because it will show you the process for how information gets recorded and stored in the system. The hardest part of the audit was the verification of the blockchain records, because it required the most steps to complete. The easiest part of the audit was verifying the anonymous IDs because they were all done in the same window tab and required no copy and pasting commands.

It was surprising to me that some people decided to leave questions blank and abstain from voting in certain races. For example, many ballots had no selection for Clerk and Recorder. This means that the voter chose not to vote for anyone on this race. This surprised me because if you are casting a vote for other races but decide not to vote for one specific race, it might mean that they do not approve of any candidates listed on the ballot, however, this is my personal assumption and it might not be accurate.

Personally, I believe that an online mobile voting system like Voatz can be very beneficial for people because it allows voters to anonymously cast their votes from their mobile devices and it can securely record the votes on the blockchain. In the future, the Voatz mobile voting application can make the voting process a lot easier and more accessible for everyone.

 

Yugma Patel, Masters of International Business at Hult International Business School

My name is Yugma Patel and I am currently a candidate for Masters of International Business at Hult International Business School in Cambridge, MA. I chose to pursue an International Business degree in order to gain leadership development and to potentially work in cross-cultural organizations. Being exposed to different cultures and backgrounds provides an opportunity to adapt a broader vision. That is why I am passionate about learning new things and helping people in all settings.

I had never done an audit before, so this was my first time auditing election results. It was a lengthy experience. It took about three and a half days to complete the audit. Going through each step I had to be careful and make sure there were no discrepancies between the CVR with the VVDRs or ballot images. The hardest part was making sure everything matched across all sources (VVDRs, blockchain data, CVR). The easiest  part was having all the information in one place (the audit suite). I was surprised at how the anonymous ID was generated, and also that there was no mention of an individual through the audit. In our current era, technology is quickly emerging into different industries; to see Voatz working to provide a new way of voting from an age-old method demonstrates that technology can provide the people to carry out their basic democratic rights.

 

Ben Trout, Sophomore at Brigham Young University

My name is Ben Trout, I am a Sophomore studying cybersecurity at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. I chose to pursue a career in cybersecurity because I love to apply technology to solving problems in the world, and with regards to the cybersecurity field there is a lot of opportunity for development in that regard. In high school I was a programmer for a robotics team and I loved overcoming the challenges presented to my team in those competitions and I have been passionate about the technology field ever since.

This was my first time doing an audit of any kind and I did not know what to expect going into it. Overall I did not think that the audit was a hard thing to do, however it was very time consuming. The documentation and instructions given about how to do the audit were clear and having the audit suite, which centralized access to all the necessary materials, made the process easier.

The hardest part of the audit for me was checking to make sure that the votes within the blockchain matched what was on the ballot. It required a lot of steps that had to be done in order and I sometimes lost track of which block was next to look at in the chain.

I was surprised that the blocks on the blockchain stored the votes in random order for each ballot, so each contest’s vote was stored in a different order for each ballot, which I think makes the system more secure. I have always thought that technology should be involved in democracy if it could be secured. This audit experience was a demonstration to me that we have a secure system that can be used for elections, and with it, it makes the democratic process accessible to more people that could not previously participate for accessibility reasons.

 

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Interested in participating in the audit? Sign up here by July 3, 2019.

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References:
National Conference of State Legislatures: http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/post-election-audits635926066.aspx

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Contributions:
We thank the three students who shared their audit experience.