Mobile voting provider Voatz has announced its platform is compliant with federal voting system guidelines, after ‘comprehensive’ testing by an independent lab.
Pro V&V, a software and systems third party test laboratory, authored a 47-page report which concluded that Voatz ‘meets the applicable requirements set forth for voting systems’ according to US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) guidelines.
The testing, which took five months, assessed Voatz in various departments, from source code assessments, to security, to system integration. According to the report, during the security evaluation Pro V&V was ‘able to verify that the Voatz remote accessible ballot delivery, marking and return (RABDMR) [system] utlised a blockchain-based infrastructure from the server throughout the remainder of the process.’
Voatz is a mobile elections platform aimed at providing a secure voting method for non-traditional voting groups, such as overseas and deployed military citizens, as well as voters with disabilities. The company to date has completed 67 elections, including 11 governmental elections. Yet Voatz has not been exempt from criticism – rightly or otherwise.
In February, the Iowa caucuses, part of the Democratic Party’s activities for the 2020 US presidential elections, were beset by technical glitches, with many publications refusing to call a winner until days afterwards. At the time, criticism was aimed at Voatz, believing the company’s technology was part of the process. Voatz denied this, saying it was not involved in the Iowa caucuses.
Earlier that month, an MIT study found that Voatz had ‘significant security flaws’. Researchers said they had not found evidence that the app had been hacked, but noted vulnerabilities could have been exploited. The company replied that it ‘continued to welcome critiques’ of its technology to help provide additional security to any of its platforms.
Announcing the Pro V&V verdict, Voatz added in the press materials that it had performed ‘as expected’ in each of the elections it had conducted.”We are pleased with Pro V&V’s conclusions that Voatz operates exactly as it’s designed to operate,” said Nimit Sawhney, Voatz co-founder and CEO. “Their fundings confirm our expectations, and add further fuel to support our mission that citizens can vote securely using a smartphone application and have total confidence their ballot is counted while remaining fully secret.”
You can read the full report here (pdf, no opt-in required).
Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
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