Independent Audit Validates Mobile Voting System After Denver Elections

Mobile voting is a step closer to mainstream legitimacy, with authorities in Denver having concluded a successful audit of a mobile voting system deployed in a municipal election this past spring.

Developed by Voatz, the mobile voting system used the biometric authentication technologies built into contemporary smartphones for voter verification, and leveraged blockchain public ledger technology to ensure that votes were tracked accurately and that records could not be tampered with. This system was deployed in collaboration with municipal authorities and Tusk Philanthropies, which has now announced that the National Cybersecurity Center and the Denver Election Divisions have conducted an independent audit of results from the Municipal Election and a Run-Off Election.

Auditors confirmed that for each mobile vote, a digital receipt was sent to the voter while an anonymized copy went to the Denver election office; that a scanned, paper version of each mobile vote was generated and sent to the election office; and that blockchain records were generated for each mobile vote.

What’s more, in a post-election survey, 100 percent of respondents indicated that they preferred mobile voting above all other options.

“Our goal was to offer a more convenient and secure method for military and overseas citizen voters to cast their ballots, and this pilot proved to be successful,” commented Denver Deputy Director of Elections Jocelyn Bucaro in a statement announcing the audit results. “More voters participated in this cycle, in part thanks to this convenient method, and those voters who voted using the application prefer to vote by this method in all elections in the future.”

The audit results come soon after Utah County announced it would be the third US jurisdiction to trial Voatz’s mobile voting technology last month, suggesting that the mobile voting platform is starting to gain some notable traction in the American democratic process.

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August 6, 2019 – by Alex Perala