More governments in the US are providing the choice to vote by smartphone. West Virginia’s governor is poised to sign a bill claiming that all counties provide peoples with disabilities a method to vote online, just in time for the 2020 presidential election. It might be the first state to offer the option. Whereas the details have but to be established, Secretary of State Mac Warner said it could most likely provide the cell app Voatz, similar to it did when it allowed online voting for overseas troops.
Security is a priority, though. While Warner mentioned Voatz worked well within the 2018 midterms and was going via an audit for consideration, safety researchers have cautioned towards utilizing it or different voting apps. There have been affairs that its web server and blockchain implementations weren’t all that secure and that the private source code made it harder to find vulnerabilities. There was an attempt to hack the mobile voting system in 2018, and it isn’t clear how profitable that was — officials may be taking a chance by growing access to the voting system. In contrast, an investigation into that hacking try is still ongoing.