West Virginians serving in the military will be able to vote via app this November

In November, West Virginia residents serving in the military overseas may only have to pick up their smartphone to vote.
West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner told CNN "there is nobody that deserves the right to vote any more than the guys that are out there, and the women that are out there, putting their lives on the line for us." The app they can use was developed by the Boston-based company Voatz, which says it's a perfectly secure way to vote. To register, users must take a photo of their government-issued ID, then take a video of their face, and upload both to the app. Voatz's facial recognition software will then check the ID picture against the video for final approval, and the ballots are recorded anonymously on a blockchain.
State officials are letting each county decide if they want to approve Voatz, and service members will still have the option of using a paper ballot to vote. Some security experts are alarmed by the idea of voting via app, with Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, telling CNN that mobile voting is "a horrific idea. It's internet voting on people's horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote."
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
-
Wonsan-Kalma: North Korea's new 'mammoth' beach resort
Under the Radar Pyongyang wants to boost tourism but there won't be many foreign visitors to Kim Jong Un's 'pet project'
-
The 5 best TV reboots of all time
The Week Recommends Finding an entirely new cast to play beloved characters is harder than it looks
-
Crossword: July 10, 2025
The Week's daily crossword
-
Musk chatbot Grok praises Hitler on X
Speed Read Grok made antisemitic comments and referred to itself as 'MechaHitler'
-
Disney, Universal sue AI firm over 'plagiarism'
Speed Read The studios say that Midjourney copied characters from their most famous franchises
-
Amazon launches 1st Kuiper internet satellites
Speed Read The battle of billionaires continues in space
-
Test flight of orbital rocket from Europe explodes
Speed Read Isar Aerospace conducted the first test flight of the Spectrum orbital rocket, which crashed after takeoff
-
Apple pledges $500B in US spending over 4 years
Speed Read This is a win for Trump, who has pushed to move manufacturing back to the US
-
Microsoft unveils quantum computing breakthrough
Speed Read Researchers say this advance could lead to faster and more powerful computers
-
TikTok's fate uncertain as weekend deadline looms
Speed Read The popular app is set to be banned in the U.S. starting Sunday
-
Appeals court kills FCC net neutrality rule
Speed Read A U.S. appeals court blocked Biden's effort to restore net-neutrality rules