As we are researching and developing new platform technologies necessary to someday support the development of online voting systems, we take note of others in the industry working toward such systems; especially those also using blockchain technology.

One such company is Voatz, and today I’d like to highlight their efforts and share some thoughts about their work. Let me preface this by saying that this is just one man’s opinion and perspective. I have no affiliation with Voatz, and have not closely examined their work. My words here should be viewed merely as the casual commentary of an interested bystander.

Voatz is working on solutions for an online voting app using blockchain as a durable record of the election procedures and results. They are developing the procedures and workflows necessary to conducting an online election, and creating the tools and interfaces to administrate and participate in such an election, and showing the world what it could look like.

In the course of developing these procedures, Voatz ran a pilot of their app, giving voters and administrators alike a taste of what online voting could be like, and sometime thereafter, they came under fire for the security stance of their pilot system. A team of advanced security researchers at MIT wrote a paper decrying the Voatz pilot as an insecure approach to online elections and warning the public that such solutions cannot be trusted to uphold the operations of modern democracy. Shortly thereafter, security firm Trail of Bits published a report outlining vulnerabilities in Voatz’ application and infrastructure in greater detail.

These events seem to have led to a great deal of uncertainty and doubt of Voatz’ suitability as a provider of solutions in the elections space. If their pilot was so insecure, can the company be trusted to produce solutions for use in secure elections?

As one trained in the same kind of cybersecurity analysis and techniques as were employed by the research team at MIT, I would like to share my view on these events. Elections are enormously complex endeavors that require coordination of many people and organizations, and this succeeds today by using various different procedures and methods, but a transition to online voting will massively disrupt these procedures, and nobody is yet sure how that can possibly work. Voatz is helping to find ways that it can, even while the full security architecture of a final solution is still uncertain. To do this, Voatz is working with security standards well understood by the industry today, building voting system demonstrations based on the standards we might expect from existing major tech companies.

The MIT review raises legitimate concerns about the viability of Voatz’ approach for secure elections. In a sense, the MIT researchers are pointing out that while they themselves don’t know what the security architecture of a fitting solution for online elections would be, they can clearly see that the Voatz approach isn’t it. And while this may be true, it completely misses the value of Voatz’ contribution. Voatz is showing us how online elections can look, even before the full picture of how they can work comes into focus. It doesn’t exhibit the final security architecture, and it doesn’t need to: Voatz is building to the security standards we understand today to show us how the final solution could look tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the Trail of Bits report was commissioned by Voatz to evaluate the security of their pilot against the standards Voatz was aiming for, and the vulnerabilities disclosed by that report, while serious in nature, are not fundamental flaws, and should be relatively easy to fix.

In conclusion, we at Follow My Vote are grateful to Voatz for the work they are doing to further the conversation on how online voting solutions may look in the future, how online elections can be orchestrated, and what it will be like to participate in them. We look forward to seeing what they produce next, even as we are researching and developing the foundations and underpinnings that will eventually enable applications to be deployed meeting the full security, privacy, and end-to-end verifiability requirements necessary to support modern political elections online.

The post A Word for Voatz appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Nathan Hourt, Follow My Vote Co-founder and CTO, is quoted several times throughout the article. Hourt eloquently explains risks that are neutralized with an end-to-end verifiable system.

We have included part of the Forbes article for you to read:

With accusations of election rigging and an unprecedented hack of a political party’s emails, voting security has not been this hot of an issue since Bush v. Gore and the Florida recount of 2000. Adding fuel to the fire is the FBI’s latest revelation of foreign hacking into two states’ election databases. Now, Washington officials are increasingly concerned that hackers will seek to infiltrate the decades-out-of-date voting machines with very little technical sophistication and manipulate votes cast for the next U.S. president in November.

Some cybersecurity experts have advocated for the ultimate security measure to protect U.S. elections from foreign tampering—that is, offline paper-based elections.

Yet in Virginia, the state that famously decommissioned its terrifyingly hackable voting machines last year, the startup Follow My Vote believes the solution to safeguard against vote rigging isn’t to revert to no or low-tech, but through the adoption of blockchain technology.

Aside from the obvious issue of scale, Follow My Vote’s cofounder and CTO Nathan Hourt considers paper-based voting systems precariously reliant on the procedural security of officials conducting their jobs correctly and honestly. In offline systems, “there is no way to detect a breach of security… no way to determine if all of the original ballots are still present, if any extra ballots have been added, or if any ballots have been tampered with,” Hourt argues. The risks are amplified in national elections. “The more voters a paper-based system attempts to accommodate, the easier it becomes for a fraudster to corrupt.”

Envisioning a future for e-voting

Follow My Vote aims to combat electoral fraud and protect user credentials by developing a convenient and secure end-to-end voting system that is also open-source and auditable. In their model, voters would skip the lines to cast votes online from home using a webcam and government-issued ID. The virtual electorate could then theoretically watch the election in real-time entrusting the veracity of results to the underlying blockchain auditability features.

How can a voting platform that touts transparency also be secure? Cryptography protects each ballot against tampering from end to end, keeping votes anonymous and immutable though tamper-evident on the blockchain ledger. Each voter can change his or her vote at any time during the election using a private key and unique voter ID.

Dr. Feng Hao co-lead of the Secure & Resilient Systems group at Newcastle University’s School of Computing Science argues that “end to end verifiable voting systems have the merit of allowing a voter to verify if their vote is correctly recorded and correctly included into the tallying process—and if ballots are missing in transit or modified, it can be detected by voters.”

Read the rest of the article on Forbes. 

Learn more about blockchain voting.

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post Follow My Vote Featured On Forbes For Blockchain Voting appeared first on Follow My Vote.

For a brief period in November 2000, it looked as if the future of the United States was going to be decided by chads—hanging door chads, swinging door chads, perforated chads, and yes, even the occasional dimpled chad.

When the electoral contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to only a few hundred votes in the state of Florida, all anyone could talk about were the tiny perforated circles on election ballots voters pushed to indicate their selections.

The entire thing was, unquestionably, an epic mess—the voting system of the most technologically advanced country on the planet melting down for all the world to see. It was a wake-up call that the U.S. needed to take drastic measures to transform the way people voted in the 21st century.

This newfound focus on improving the country’s elections didn’t just extend to looking for more reliable balloting machines. With an increasing number of people using the Internet on a daily basis, the 2000 election sparked an interest in developing technologies that would let people vote online with their own personal computers in the comfort of their own homes.

If implemented correctly, the proliferation of online voting could solve one of the biggest problems in American democracy: low voter turnout. The 2014 midterms boasted the lowest voter turnout in 72 years. In the three most populous states in the country, less than one-third of voters submitted ballots. For off-year and primary elections, the percentage of Americans who go to the polls is even lower. During Texas’s primary election in March of last year, only one out of every 10 registered voters bothered to show up.

Low turnout leads to political polarization because the most ideologically extreme voters on either side are the most likely to participate. When politicians know they’re mainly accountable to rigid partisans, the country gets politicians more interested in shutting down the government to win political points than making compromises in good faith. Making it easier to vote by moving the action from a polling station to your pocket could only increase turnout, especially in the primaries.

Yet 15 years after the 2000 debacle, online voting in the United States has barely advanced.

The state of Alaska’s Department of Elections set up an online voting system, but no one else has replicated it. A program backed by the Department of Defense to enable online voting for Americans living overseas was scrapped in 2004, eight months before it was scheduled for deployment, due to security concerns.

Making online voting work is infinitely harder than it initially seems. However, in the past few years, there’s been a renewed effort to solve the conundrum of online voting using a most unexpected tool: Bitcoin.

Source: kernelmag.dailydot.com

The post The Proof is in the Blockchain! appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Online voting requires independent accountability. Blockchain is the best available protocol to guarantee that accountability: a decentralized ledger that can certify any kind of event that happens online. Any user, without the need of requesting permission to an organization, can validate and count every interaction or vote that was made by an online application. Who votes remains anonymous but how many votes is verifiable. By combining this protocol with the open source application DemocracyOS (backed by Y Combinator) we could offer an online solution for voting that could guarantee transparency and openness. This is the key to online trust and a leap civic tech needs.

In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.

Provide support to Open Source voting software DemocracyOS to register online votes in the Blockchain making them unchangeable and verifiable by third parties.

Briefly describe the need that you’re trying to address.

Online voting is still perceived as polling and registering votes in the blockchain can build trust in this process by making the counted votes verifiable by anyone (even if they don’t use or access DemocracyOS). Any implementation of electronic voting can benefit from this technology being available for free with its entire source code available, hopefully becoming a standard for such action. Online civic participation benefits from transparency (open source) and trust (blockchain) by having a robust combination of these technologies.

What progress have you made so far?

DemocracyOS is one of the most active open source efforts to deliver a debate and voting platform. The application has been under development for 3 years with a strong community that contributes daily to its source code (github.com/democracyos) and a hub platform for quick and easy setups. Blockchain use has grown exponentially in the quantity of transactions since 2010 (mostly for commercial applications that support Bitcoin) but as the technology matures new applications are developed. DemocracyOS development and designs team has been exploring it as a way to certify events in time (contracts, transactions and votes) as a side project. We now see it as a core feature of our software and a useful development for other civic tech apps that can benefit from it.

Read More Here: http://pi.vu/66aT.

The post Blockchain Technology offers Support to DemocracyOS appeared first on Follow My Vote.

While Bitcoin has received the lion’s share of attention since its conception, recently the Blockchain — the distributed public database used to record Bitcoin transactions — has just begun entering the spotlight for enabling some important capabilities outside of Bitcoin.

“It’s my belief that Blockchain technology will be as important to the world as Gutenburg’s printing press,” Nic Cary, cofounder of Blockchain.info, told me recently. “For the first time in the history of the world we can reimagine how the world transacts without relying on an intermediary.”

One way the Blockchain might change the world is through Distributed Cloud Storage.

Distributed Cloud Storage

The Blockchain has already been manipulated to store information in unscaleable ways. A niche storage trick is sending small amounts of Bitcoin to addresses that represent information when converted into a Unicode format. For example, the above image of Nelson Mandela is recorded in this transaction.

Besides being a hobby for techies, Blockchain data storage could be disruptive. Current cloud storage services are centralized — thus users must place trust in a single storage provider. With the Blockchain, this can become decentralized. For instance, Storj is beta-testing cloud storage using a Blockchain-powered network to improve security and decrease dependency. Additionally users can rent out their excess storage capacity, Airbnb-style, creating new marketplaces.

Read More Here: venturebeat.com

The post How BlockChain Technology will Change the World appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Recently there were comments made by Gov. Rick Scott and his administration in an attempt to stymie what will surely be a huge step forward for the digital democracy. We will continue to watch Florida closely!

The Scott administration’s behind-the-scenes opposition has opened a new rift between Scott’s office and county supervisors and stirred new speculation that Scott may not want to take steps that would expand the pool of voters as he explores a possible U.S. Senate bid in 2018.

Florida would become the 25th state with an online voter registration program under a bill (SB 228) sponsored by Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth. The idea has broad bipartisan support as well as the backing of AARP, the League of Women Voters and Disability Rights of Florida, and it unanimously passed a Senate committee Thursday.

But a staff report of the bill by Scott’s Division of Elections refers to the bill as a “mandate (that) presents potential risks and challenges” at a time when the state’s voter registration and driver license databases are both undergoing extensive changes. Florida relies on driver license information to verify voters’ identities.

The report says: “Malicious cyber-attacks and non-malicious malfunctions could potentially wreak havoc on an online voter registration system” and online registrations “could potentially increase the chances of votes being cast by someone other than the people actually registered to vote.”

Read Full Article Here.

The post Negative Comments Surrounding Florida’s Online Voter Registration Stir Officials appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Tell us about yourself and California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO).

I am a California-based civil rights activist with a focus on election system security. In 2000, I became interested in reformist efforts, and in 2005 began advocating for open source (GPL) systems. Initially there was a group called Open Voting Consortium doing good work; then the California Association of Voting Officials was created.

CAVO’s mission is to oversee the deployment of publicly-owned/state-certified OS voting systems. Publicly-owned open source (General Public License) voting systems will be less expensive and more secure. Off-the-shelf commodity hardware can be utilized as well.

Tell us about the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), its origins, and what it now calls for.

HAVA was created in response to the 2000 debacle. Lobbyists Bob Ney and Jack Abramoff pushed for it, and the rest is history. Basically, America was sold a 4.5 billion dollar batch of bogus voting systems that government reports have condemned as flawed. The vendors seized the lock-in opportunity to push poorly-made and high-priced systems, and it continues to this day.

The good part of the Act was its attempt to accommodate the disability community, but that attempt failed. The disability community is still hopeful for a future technological solution.

Read More Here: https://opensource.com/government/15/3/open-source-transparent-voting/

The post Who is Leading for Transparency in Democratic Elections appeared first on Follow My Vote.

None of these scenarios come even close, though, to being the oddest occurrences in the game. In fact, there have been some problems with online and electronic voting that have just left people flabbergasted. There was the situation that just occurred very recently in Canada, with an entire set of municipal elections stalled due to human error resulting in the misnaming of the files that stored the votes. While it is certainly understandable that human error may occur at any time, for it to happen in a situation as important as this just shows how fragile the system truly happens to be. Or there’s the situation that occurred in Denmark in 2006, where using a process known as Van Eck Phreaking forced officials to ban electronic voting for the time being. This process happens when radio emissions from the voting machine’s monitor are captured, then able to be replicated, to some extent, on a remote monitor. Wij vertrouwen stemcomputersniet” (“We don’t trust voting computers”) was the group that carried out the experiments, and were able to convince voting officials that electronic voting machines simply were not up to the task. Bringing it back to the United States, there were multiple scenarios in the midterm election where, due to “calibration” issues, voters would select a candidate, only to have another candidate chosen.

So as you may be able to ascertain, the online voting game, to this point, has had it’s fair shares of ups, but an oppressive amount of downs. Unfortunately the attitude that has arisen out of these failures isn’t one of, “What can we do to fix these issues and move forward,” but instead a feeling of defeat. There are many among the public who believe that there is just no way, in today’s world, that secure and transparent online voting can exist. Take for example, the word of Ron Rivest, an MIT computer scientist and early pioneer of current cryptography. He, for one, believes that if the resources are available to maintain such secure and transparent results, then they shouldn’t be wasted on voting. Instead, they should be used for the Department of Defense, or the financial industry. Of course, he is correct, to an extent. The cryptographic technology used to aid Follow My Vote’s systems could have ramifications for a variety of fields, true. However, we feel that the timing is appropriate to assist with the voting industry because at the end of the day, this is what the foundation of our country is built on, the ability to choose those who represent us. Also, it is disappointing to see a gentleman, whose entire career is based on forward-thinking be so willing to completely dismiss the idea. Suffice it to say, perhaps he just isn’t willing to think outside of the box on this issue, or he just doesn’t hold voting in as high regard as, well, money or war.

However, we aren’t going to let this negativity slow down what we are trying to achieve. We do, in fact, believe that secure online voting can be done, and in the next post, we’re going to give you some insight into what exactly is allowing us the opportunity to prove ourselves.

~ Brice Moon ~

The post The Road to California – Part Four appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Estonia.

I’m going to let you lower the one eyebrow that is inevitably raised right now.

It is indeed true that Estonia, the former Soviet Bloc country, is one of the pioneers of widespread online voting. Established in 2005, their voting system has been adopted by nearly a quarter of the country’s electorate, and it is one that they actually believe in and support. It most definitely creates a positive picture for the system, but not everything is bright and cheery. In fact, one of the biggest concerns for the system is that it could be open to attack in a manner that is swift, silent, and nearly undetectable…from Russia. Tensions have been high between the two countries since the dissolution of the Soviet Republic over two decades ago.

In fact, researchers from Michigan University have proven that by using simple malware programs installed on voters computers, all they have to do is wait for the user to log in. After this, the highway for any changes to be made were wide open. They also discovered that by uploading a specific Trojan software to the servers responsible for these votes, they could take votes that were, for all intents and purposes, legitimate and turn them into votes for whoever they pleased, leaving the voter thinking their vote was counted as cast. While Estonia has claimed that these tests were faulty, and that they had the security protocols necessary to prevent such attacks, it nevertheless casted a shadow on the system. A big problem with the system is its lack of transparency, with the government only releasing bits and pieces of the source code to the public. This prevents the user from having their opportunity to detect any weaknesses in the system, and basically leaves the entire process to chance. This is one of the biggest issues…

Trust.

One of, if not the most important factors of voting is trust. In the midst of the entire process, trust is necessary to keep it going. We as voters have to trust that the system we are using allows our vote to, well, actually count as well as be counted as cast. Norway, a country known for its progressive nature, has recently taken its shot at the online voting game, albeit with less positive results than Estonia. One important takeaway from their attempt is that they did in fact allow the source code to be available to the public, that way the electorate had full access to the system they were using. Great start, but unfortunately there were a few flaws.

One, the system was unable to completely quell voter’s fears, ultimately leaving officials to declare the program didn’t do anything to add to the voter pool. Also, days before their elections in 2013, software experts cast their shadow of doubt over the program, claiming the random number generator for the voting algorithms were easily exploitable. These results led to the experts asking for the system to be scrapped and re-written to ensure better results. Oh, and the true insult to Norway’s method was the finding that nearly one percent of voters were actually able to vote twice, once online, and then again in person, with both votes being counted. Ouch. For these reasons, Norway’s online system has in fact been shut down, and any attempts to reinstate the process must be rewritten and brought bac to Norway’s Parliament for approval.

This continues to show that Follow My Vote’s focus is in the right direction. The biggest flaws with the voting system today involve safety, security, and transparency. Unfortunately, all attempts to this point have only addressed one or two of the issues, never truly all three. Join me next time as we take one more look at some of the issues surrounding online voting, and why some experts claim the system can never work logistically. Until next time, readers.

~ Brice Moon ~

The post The Road to California – Part Three appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Voting.

To this day, in the United States, the vast majority of us are still using paper ballots or antiquated touchscreen systems to cast our votes. It’s embarrassing, to say the least, and we all know the issues with paper; namely ballot stuffing, hanging chads, scanning problems, the list is not small. That doesn’t mean that people haven’t been trying to fix the system…quite the contrary, really. Across the world, attempts have been made to usher in a new-age of voting, to varying degrees of success. I’m here today to share with you some of these attempts, and discuss what exactly has gone wrong, and what we can learn from their mistakes to ensure they don’t get made again.

Actually, to be completely honest, America does have an online voting system in place. In fact, nearly 3 million people were expected to have the ability to vote online for the midterm elections a month ago. These people were mostly members of the military, or overseas personnel currently abroad…or Alaskans. However, it must be pointed out, and I can not stress this enough, that while these people may be able to vote over the internet, they are doing so with the understand that they are waiving their rights to a secret ballot, and that faulty transmissions are not out of the question. Basically, the whole system is a crap shoot, no better than any systems that we have in place today. What is the point of even voting if there is no guarantee that it is going to be counted? This is only the most important of civic duties after all, and I’m pretty sure those who choose to engage in it would like to know that their vote counts.

In Alaska’s case, let’s just say that you’ve read, understood, and signed the waiver. The vote has been placed, submitted as a PDF, and sent back to the election commission representing your district. Along that path, though, cybersecurity experts were, in less than a day, able to develop a system that allowed the PDF to be temporarily intercepted, changed, and then sent along its merry way. Worst of all, this was all done while leaving the user in the dark and having them think that their intended vote was what made it through. Secure? No. Safe? Nope. Transparent? Absolutely not. While the effort must be applauded for merely just giving it a shot, this is a dart that didn’t even really hit the board.

Of course, this isn’t the only instance in which the United States has taken a crack at the online voting game. In 2010, Washington D.C., our lovely capital city, developed a pilot program intended to allow absentee voters the opportunity to vote online. It was then left open to the public to attempt to find any issues with the program, and lo and behold, in less than 24 hours, multiple groups had successfully hacked the system, changing votes and performing other various acts of prankish villainy (electing HAL 9000 as the council chairman). More frightening, though, was the noticing that multiple groups from China and Iran had gotten their way through some of the security protocols as well, turning this experiment into a problem of national security. Again, the ideals of safety, security, and transparency had been compromised, and the program was abandoned for the near future.

I think this is a good stopping point for today, please check back in later for a deeper look at some systems that have been tried outside of the United States, because some countries have actually found a semblance of success in their methods.

The post The Road to California – Part Two appeared first on Follow My Vote.