The US Post Office Worked on Project to Build and Test Secret Voting System Before the 2020 Election

The U.S. Postal Service pursued a project to build and secretly test a blockchain-based mobile phone voting system before the 2020 election, experimenting with a technology that the government’s own cybersecurity agency says can’t be trusted to securely handle ballots.

The system was never deployed in a live election and was abandoned in 2019, Postal Service spokesman David Partenheimer said. That was after cybersecurity researchers at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs conducted a test of the system during a mock election and found numerous ways that it was vulnerable to hacking.

The project appears to have been conducted without the involvement of federal agencies more closely focused on elections, which were then scrambling to make voting more secure in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 contest. Those efforts focused primarily on using paper ballot so the voter could verify their vote was recorded accurately and there would be a paper trail for auditors — something missing from any mobile phone or Internet-based system.

The secrecy of the Postal Service’s mobile voting project alarmed election security officials and advocates who fear it could spark conspiracy theories and degrade public faith in the democratic process. Those concerns have grown immensely since the 2020 election, bolstered by baseless claims of election fraud by former president Donald Trump and his supporters.