In a sign how challenging the oft-cited election voting from your phones would be, the USPS tried to do it and failed. Wait, what? That’s right, in the runup to the 2020 Presidential Elections, the USPS decided to test mobile voting based on the blockchain system that national security agencies advised is not particularly suited for the task, reports the Washington Post.
Blockchain technology’s potential to strengthen digital transaction security is a concept we have explored on our journey to better meet our customers’ current and future needs, and to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. But we don’t have plans to advance this system.
Mr. Partenheimer also said that the patents that the Postal Service has filed around the blockchain voting method are “exploratory,” and no retail model of the mobile ballot system is being employed any time soon. Some security agency officials and researchers were alarmed they knew nothing of the effort.
Former senior adviser to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Matt Masterson said he was not aware of the Postal Service’s trials and would have preferred an open discussion: “If you’re doing anything in the election space, transparency should be priority number one. There should be no guessing game around this.”
Susan Greenhalgh, an election security adviser for the Free Speech for People nonprofit which is against mobile voting, was even blunter: “It’s scandalous for a government entity to conduct research into the security of blockchain online voting, which shows how insecure it is, but then hide the results and deprive the public and officials of these findings for over two years.”
