Voatz Inc

Voatz is a for-profit, private mobile Internet voting application. The stated mission of Voatz is to "make voting not only more accessible and secure, but also more transparent, auditable and accountable."[1] The company is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.[2] Citizens in Utah, Colorado, West Virginia, and other spots around the country have used the mobile app Voatz to cast their ballots in statewide elections. 2020, ″marks the first time people have used the technology to vote in a presidential contest.″[3] The app has also been used by the city of Denver for its municipal elections in 2019, and West Virginia used it for its primary in 2018.[3] Voatz has participated in ″82 elections around the world and served 2 million voters so far, including in Canada, Venezuela and the U.S.″[4] In September 2021 Voatz was used in the Philippines when the Philippines’Commission on Elections (Comelec)ran mock trials on the blockchain-enabled voting platform.[4] In a 2018 pilot project for West Virginia, using Voatz, American voters submitted ballots from 29 countries including Albania, Botswana, Egypt, Mexico and Japan.[5] Before 2020, Voatz received substantial criticism for not being transparent with their auditing process; although Voatz had claimed to be subjected to security audits by independent technology firms, it was not been forthcoming with the results. For example, when reporters have reached out to auditors they did not hear back,[6] and Voatz has insisted that these same companies sign non-disclosure agreements prior to investigating the company.[7] In 2020, a report by MIT researchers identified a number of high-severity vulnerabilities in Voatz's architecture,[8] which Voatz vehemently denied, calling the research "flawed.".[9] A follow-on security assessment, paid for by Voatz itself, was released by the security auditing firm Trail of Bits, confirming the MIT researchers' results, and another 48 technical issues were reported (plus 31 threat model findings for a total of 79 findings), a third of which were rated 'high severity.'[10] 8 of the 48 technical issues were addressed.[10] Voatz has since claimed that it has made ″improvements after the MIT report came out, specifically around something called a side-channel attack, in which a hacker can potentially recover a user's secret ballot.″[4] Voatz was created by Nimit Sawhney in 2014, and was developed as a side project at a SXSW hackathon.[11] As of October 2019, the startup has conducted over 31 pilots and completed a $7 million Series A in June.[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voatz