To date, Voatz has conducted more than 140 successful live elections in 7 countries including state, municipal, and federal elections; political elections, conventions, caucus voting; union elections, student government elections, professional associations; and town meeting voting. In its largest election, more than 1.7 million votes were cast and our platform capacity has been benchmarked to support more than 100 million voters. For more details on our elections and the voter experience, please visit our blog.
Voatz has formed a diverse, collaborative network across the technology, cybersecurity, democracy, and elections sectors. Our partners include election jurisdictions and officials among others, viewable here.
Elections are run differently across the world, and each jurisdiction usually has a governing board that decides which processes and technologies will facilitate voting.
Things are no different in the U.S., where election decisions are made at the state level. Most often, the Secretaries of State, State Election Directors, and other government officials hire one of a number of companies that specialize in election technologies and services—everything from paper ballots and tabulation machines, to personnel support services. The major companies offering these services have been around for at least a decade.
Voatz is one of the youngest companies to enter into the field. While Voatz leverages some of the latest technologies across its voting platform, it also produces a paper ballot so that it can integrate seamlessly into the existing infrastructure. This process alleviates the burden on election officials who otherwise have to manually process mailed-in absentee ballots (opening the envelope, flattening the ballot, scanning), and e-mailed absentee ballots from military and overseas citizens (opening the email, hand-copying selections onto a tabulatable paper ballot, scanning).
If a voter lives in a jurisdiction offering Voatz, the process is as follows:
- REQUEST — A voter requests to vote absentee from their jurisdiction and indicates they’d like to “vote mobile” (which often requires filling out an “absentee voter request form”).
- VERIFY — The voter receives an invitation to download the Voatz app and verify their identity (usually by scanning a government-issued photo ID).
- VOTE — Once verified, the voter votes on the smartphone and a paper ballot is produced at the jurisdiction for tabulation. The voter also receives a ballot receipt confirming their selections. Both documents are digitally signed with an anonymous ID to preserve privacy.
- CONFIRM — After the election, an audit confirms that the tabulation (paper ballots) match voter intent (ballot receipts).
There are several important differences between traditional internet voting and the Voatz platform. Internet voting generally refers to the submission of a ballot on a website from a personal computer (PC) with generally very few safeguards.
In contrast, the Voatz mobile application can only be downloaded to recently manufactured smartphones. These phones need to have several advanced security mechanisms, including fingerprint and facial recognition, which Voatz uses for secure voter identity verification and ballot submission. These phones also contain hardware-based security mechanisms to store private keys, which provide the ability to conduct highly secure, encrypted transactions over the internet. Finally, Voatz stores all votes on a permissioned blockchain which is ultimately monitored by various stakeholders (e.g. a Secretary of State or officials with the state board of elections) to ensure they are tamper-resistant, auditable and immutable.
Similarly, the Voatz web application includes several technologically pioneering innovations that make it very difficult for a malicious actor to compromise the voting process. Read one of our whitepapers to learn more about our unique approach.
Voatz is a mobile elections platform that enables citizens to vote without having to visit their polling place or submit a paper ballot via mail. Voatz leverages the security features built into the latest versions of smartphone technology, biometrics, and the immutability of the blockchain to ensure each vote is secure. All votes submitted on the Voatz platform generate a paper ballot for tabulation, along with a receipt for voters to verify their selections.
Since June 2016, more than 5 million voters have used the Voatz platform across more than 140 elections. Voatz has a wide array of experience working with several major political parties, as well as states, cities, towns, universities, churches, professional associations and unions, all in an effort to make voting safe, convenient, and reliable.
The founders started Voatz in 2015 almost by accident. They won the ‘Hack to the Future’ hackathon at SXSW in 2014 with an idea for mobile voting and preventing voter coercion, which later became the early seedlings of the Voatz platform. Drawing from their careers in technology, mobile security, backend infrastructure, and digital payments, they began exploring an alternative method of voting that would make the process more trusted and convenient. Voatz has since grown into a passionate group of people who are determined to make voting safe, accessible, and secure.