{"id":7339,"date":"2018-04-04T19:05:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T19:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/statescoop.scpnewsgrp.com\/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia-to-run-an-election-on-blockchain\/"},"modified":"2021-09-03T13:51:35","modified_gmt":"2021-09-03T17:51:35","slug":"meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia-to-run-an-election-on-blockchain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia-to-run-an-election-on-blockchain\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the guy paying for West Virginia to run an election on blockchain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bradley Tusk is best known as the former political operative who\u00a0invented lobbying for the sharing\u00a0economy<\/a>. He’s the guy who claims credit for turning hordes of Uber customers into city-hall picketers whenever the ride-hailing company objected to new taxi regulations in New York, Washington, or a half-dozen other cities. When states tried to crack down on fantasy\u00a0sports websites that offer daily cash prizes, one of the biggest, Fanduel, hired Tusk to mobilize its user base to hit back at attorneys general. When a local government suggests that the the people who pick up home-improvement jobs through Handy should be classified as employees entitled to benefits, the app calls in Tusk to argue that those workers are independent contractors.<\/p>\n

Lobbying for \u2014 and investing in \u2014 these companies has been lucrative for Tusk, who earned a reported\u00a0$100 million in Uber stock<\/a>\u00a0he received as payment for his work on behalf of the company. Along the way, he’s also set up a\u00a0venture-capital fund<\/a>\u00a0with a portfolio full of healthcare and financial-tech startups, a casino-management firm, and a philanthropic arm.<\/p>\n

Now, Tusk \u2014 who spent his political years working for the likes of Democratic New York\u00a0Sen.\u00a0Chuck Schumer, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg \u2014wants to spend some of that money on next month’s primary election in West Virginia. He’s not backing any specific candidate, but he’s paying for the state to offer a small group of voters the ability to cast their ballots over the internet, using software that runs on blockchain, the in-vogue encryption platform in which secured data is stored on a decentralized network. (Its best-known use is cryptocurrency, like bitcoin.)<\/p>\n

The online voting will be available only to deployed\u00a0active-duty military members and their families who list their official residences\u00a0in one of two counties \u2014 likely\u00a0limiting the sample size to no more than a few dozen voters \u2014 but Tusk sees it as the first dose of the cure for what ails the republic.<\/p>\n

“This is one of the critical things we can do to save democracy,” Tusk says in an interview.<\/p>\n

The meek need not apply<\/strong><\/p>\n

As he sees it, giving people an avenue to vote using a smartphone app is a sure way to boost turnout and change who wields influence in elections.\u00a0There’s no reliable national figure for\u00a0turnout in primary elections in midterm years, though those years\u00a0typically\u00a0bring out fewer voters than presidential years.\u00a0Only 36\u00a0percent of eligible voters\u00a0participated\u00a0in 2014’s general elections<\/a>, compared to 61 percent in 2016.<\/p>\n

Tusk’s found a willing partner for his experiment in Mac Warner, West Virginia’s secretary of state, who’ll oversee the May 8 election in which voters will select their parties’ nominees for a U.S. Senate seat, three U.S. House seats, the 100-seat state house of delegates, and half the state senate. (Warner, a Republican elected in 2016, isn’t on the ballot again until 2020.) Warner\u00a0has been very enthusiastic so far.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOur military service personnel fight every day across the globe to protect our way of life,” Warner said last week<\/a> while announcing the blockchain vote. “They deserve to vote as much as anyone, and we owe it to them to make the process as easy as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On paper, military voters are an ideal demographic for an online-voting experiment. The Pentagon works with states to send mail-in ballots to service members deployed around the world and return them to election officials, but those votes are often among the last to be counted.<\/p>\n

Eligible military voters from the two participating counties \u2014 Monongalia and Harrison, which have a combined population of about 173,000 \u2014 will be invited to use an app by a Boston-based company named Voatz<\/a>, which will log votes using blockchain.<\/p>\n

Tusk says it\u2019ll cost him about $150,000 to cover West Virginia\u2019s contract with Voatz. While he adds he’s not\u00a0a “blockchain evangelist\u201d like some venture capitalists, his fund\u00a0does have a stake in the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.\u00a0But he\u00a0says he doesn\u2019t have any direct investment in Voatz. He did have to shop around for a state to partner with, though.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce I reached this conclusion that it was a really important thing to do, we wanted to do a few things,\u201d Tusk says. \u201cOne was talking to blockchain companies like Voatz, and then figuring out what election officials out there were bold enough, and Mac Warner was. I think he understands what it\u2019s like to risk your life for our right to vote and not having your vote county.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner spent most of his career as an Army judge advocate officer, and his children are active-duty Army officers. Warner\u2019s son, Scott, was the first person to cast a ballot using Voatz’s system, declaring it, according to\u00a0his dad\u2019s office<\/a>, to be \u201cpretty slick.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘Completely nuts’<\/strong><\/p>\n

But Tusk\u2019s financial backing and the Warner family\u2019s enthusiasm shouldn\u2019t be taken as proof that elections can be conducted securely over the internet, says Duncan Buell, a computer science professor at the University of South Carolina who focuses on\u00a0voting systems and\u00a0election integrity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am strongly\u00a0opposed to electronic voting, and I think the whole notion of internet voting is completely nuts,\u201d Buell says. \u201cThere are a number of issues that come up. The first is authentication. How do you verify who\u2019s at the other end?\u201d<\/p>\n

Tusk says Voatz will verify participants through the fingerprint-scanning or facial-recognition technology on its\u00a0users’ smartphones, though Buell says both those protocols can be hacked. Such instances are rare, but not impossible<\/a>.\u00a0But even if the personal authentication on the voter\u2019s end can be perfected, Buell says there are other potential security holes after a vote has been cast.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe other problem we have is that at least as far as I can see from the Voatz website, this is yet again an instance of faith-based voting,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have no more reason to think Voatz got its software right as we do these [paperless ballots], because we can\u2019t see the code. There\u2019s an old adage in computer-science class: To err is human, but to really screw things up it takes a computer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Electronic voting, and especially online voting, comes\u00a0with a host of other problems. For starters, Buell says, it transfers authority from government elections officials to software firms with proprietary code. A vote without a paper trail also makes it difficult to challenge potentially corrupted ballots, or for voters accused of corruption to defend themselves. And a successful hack could potentially influence thousands of ballots in an instant, Buell warns.<\/p>\n

Buell, who\u2019s not alone among elections experts who believe voting is best kept on paper, also sees blockchain as more of an unnecessary trend than a long-term option.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone is doing something with blockchain because it\u2019s fashionable,\u201d he says. \u201cOur own state election director was quoted after the 2012 election as saying she wanted people to vote on their phones. It always sounds like a cool idea because it\u2019ll get young people to turn out, but I\u2019m not aware of anything that says it would actually increase turnout.\u201d<\/p>\n

A 2015 report<\/a> by the Beneson Strategy Group did find that 49 percent of millennials said an online option would make them more likely to vote. But politics is still a bigger motivator than ballot technology. A poll published last month by SurveyMonkey and Cosmopolitan<\/a> found that 68 percent of people aged 18 to 34 say they plan to vote this November.<\/p>\n

But even if going online induces a few more young people to vote, West Virginia\u2019s pilot next month still leaves many security questions. Blockchain proponents like Tusk defend their platform by pointing to its decentralization across an ever-growing number of computers, with information retrievable only through a series of long keys.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s verified in so many different machines at the same time,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Warner\u2019s confidence is even more blunt. He says he’s not aware of anyone who’s hacked blockchain.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s very dangerous to say it\u2019s as close to unhackable as posible,\u201d Buell says in response. \u201cIt was Robert Mueller who said there are only two kinds of computers on the internet\u201d \u2014 paraphrasing the former FBI director, who\u2019s now investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election \u2014 \u201cthose that have been hacked and those that have not yet been hacked.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Venture capitalist Bradley Tusk says it’ll help “save democracy.” But an expert on voting systems says it raises a slew of questions about ballot integrity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":200,"featured_media":39356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20646,20649,4677],"tags":[52,16536,125,51,1638,29,4,1274],"people":[],"special-report":[],"authors":[],"class_list":["post-7339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","category-emerging-tech","category-state","tag-blockchain","tag-cybersecurity","tag-election-security","tag-emerging-technology","tag-mac-warner","tag-states","tag-tech-news","tag-west-virginia"],"yoast_head":"\nMeet the guy paying for West Virginia to run an election on blockchain | StateScoop<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/meet-the-guy-paying-for-west-virginia-to-run-an-election-on-blockchain\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Meet the guy paying for West Virginia to run an election on blockchain | StateScoop\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Venture capitalist Bradley Tusk says it'll help "save democracy." 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