I briefly commented on Voatz in my thesis[1] last year: Voatz is another blockchain-related voting project. They claim to have been involved in a real world mo

I briefly commented on Voatz in my thesis[1] last year: Voatz is another blockchain-related voting project. They claim to have been involved in a real world mobile voting experiment in West Virginia with real votes cast through their mobile application. However, their source code and voting protocol are not available for review. Voatz is a great example of how commercial vendors can fill the letter of the law without filling the spirit: what they refer to as a ”paper audit trail” is literally a physical print of their digital records. If the digital records are corrupted before printing, the paper records will be likewise corrupted. Based on the descriptions on the FAQ page, Voatz servers are all running the same software, and the voter needs their vote to be recorded on all of them in order to receive confirmation that their vote has been recorded. This seems like the worst of both worlds: a single misbehaving authority can prevent the election from proceeding, and at the same time, the ”verifiable blockchain” benefits are undermined by running the same closed-source unverifiable software on all of the servers and the same closed-source unverifiable software on all of the clients. The replication of servers provides security benefits only against physical tampering of the machines – since the same software is running on all of them, an accidental or intentional flaw in the software can be exploited to manipulate votes on all servers simultaneously. 1. https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/