The state of West Virginia is planning to allow overseas voting via smartphone in the 2018 election, and election security experts aren't happy about it.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/experts-criticize-west-virginias-plan-for-smartphone-voting/?comments=1
"Mobile voting is a horrific idea," said Joe Hall, an election security expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology in an interview with CNN.
The West Virginia project is being run by Voatz, a startup with $2 million in venture capital funding. To ensure buzzword-compliance, the Voatz system uses a blockchain in addition to a mobile app.
The state did a limited trial run of the technology in West Virginia's primary election back in May. Military voters from two West Virginia counties were offered the option to vote via their smartphone instead of sending in an absentee ballot via mail, fax, or email. West Virginia's secretary of state told CNN that the pilot worked well and that the system passed four audits of various parts of the system. So this November, the state is planning to offer the system more broadly to West Virginians deployed overseas.
Domestic voters in West Virginia would continue using more conventional systems.
Key Concerns:
- There is no foolproof way to prevent or even detect attacks on electronic voting systems.
- EV systems are kept offline during elections, but mobile phones are always online.
- A voter has no way to tell if their smartphone has been compromised.
- Voting is predicated on a secret ballot. How can you establish an anonymous audit trail ?
- Blockchain may provide an audit trail, but how can it provide anonymity ?
- Even if the cryptography is secure, the phones of individual voters are not.
- A distributed network of blockchain servers multiplies the points of vulnerability.
- Voting credentials could be stolen at the point of issue.
- Not everyone owns a mobile smartphone.
- Voatz is a startup company with $2million in venture capital funding.
As one commentator quipped:
I wonder how much of that venture capital was in roubles?
