Voatz

About Voatz

Voatz is a for-profit, private company operating in the election technology sector, providing a mobile-first voting platform. It was formally established in late 2016 by brothers Nimit and Simer Sawhney. The idea originated after the founders, drawing on personal experiences of witnessing voter coercion in their native India, won a 'Hack to the Future' competition at SXSW in 2014 with a prototype for a secure mobile voting app. Nimit Sawhney, the CEO, has a background in mobile and cybersecurity, while his brother's expertise is in enterprise SaaS software.

The company's business model is based on a tiered, per-voter fee for each election, supplemented by professional services fees for setup, system integration, and enhanced security monitoring. Voatz targets election management bodies (EMBs) as its primary clients, serving a market that includes government elections, state political parties, universities, and private organizations like unions. Significant milestones include being the first to use a mobile, blockchain-based system in a U.S. federal election in West Virginia in 2018 for overseas and military voters, and later being used in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election in Utah County. The company has facilitated over 125 elections and is a graduate of the Techstars Boston and MassChallenge accelerators.

The Voatz platform enables users to vote via a smartphone or tablet. The process is permission-based, requiring an invitation from a verified election organizer. Voter identity is verified through a multi-step process: the user submits a photo of a government-issued ID and a 'selfie' video, which are compared using facial recognition technology, sometimes by a third-party service like Jumio. Once authenticated against voter rolls, the voter uses biometrics (like a fingerprint) or a 6-digit PIN to cast an anonymized ballot. Voatz states that personally identifiable information is deleted after verification. The platform utilizes a permissioned blockchain, based on Hyperledger's open-source software and hosted on distributed servers, to create an immutable and auditable record of the anonymized votes. For many government elections, the system produces a paper ballot from the digital record for final tabulation, integrating with existing infrastructure.

However, Voatz's approach has generated considerable debate within the cybersecurity community. Security experts have raised concerns regarding the system's security and lack of transparency. A 2020 report by MIT researchers, followed by a security audit from Trail of Bits that was paid for by Voatz, identified numerous high-severity vulnerabilities. The company has disputed these findings, highlighting its successful track record of over 70 elections without a breach and noting that it was the first remote voting platform to complete testing with a Federally-certified Voting Systems Test Laboratory (VSTL) in July 2020.