West Virginia allows military residents to vote with the help of their smartphones

West Virginia must make history before Tuesday's mid-term elections, as the first state to allow residents of the military to vote on a smartphone.

The state has partnered with the Boston-based startup, Voatz, to launch a mobile voting platform this year in 24 counties to boost voter turnout.

The state is known to have one of the highest rates of military service per capita, but it receives only a small fraction of the votes of active residents of the military.

West Virginia Secretary of State Andrew "Mac" Werner said that in the 2016 presidential election, less than 10 percent of the votes of active residents of the military were collected because of the difficulty of use paper ballots by correspondence abroad.

"When I was in the army myself, there were a number of situations in which I had difficulty voting, and then my four children were also part of the military. and also had difficulty voting. In fact, they could not vote at all during various periods, "Warner told FOX Business.

He added that factors such as deployment or some remote locations prevent members of the service from voting by mail.

According to the data, less than 13% of active US military members vote today.

"That's a real problem, and when I became West Virginia's secretary of state, I wanted to find a way to do it and we found the solution was technology," said Werner.

Last May, in the first election, Voatz launched a pilot program with West Virginia, but decided to extend it at mid-term to further improve voter turnout.

Jonathan Johnson, board member of Voatz, said that despite the concerns over mobile phone voting, the platform is very secure.

"This is not an Internet vote via a browser. It's through an application using a modern smartphone with fingerprint recognition or facial fingerprinting capabilities, "Johnson told FOX Business.

In order to vote via Voatz, the voter must verify his identity with the help of a voter ID and a video selfie. The final ballot is anonymized and secured with the blockchain.

Lieutenant Andrew Warner, an engineer officer of the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Brigade, currently based in Vicenza, Italy, told FOX Business that he had used the application at twice to vote, the first in the primaries and recently in the general elections. The time and effort required to vote abroad has been significantly reduced.

"Now that I have a Voatz account, I receive a notification when the ballot is available, I extract it, I select my candidates, I click Send and I'm done," he says.

Lieutenant Warner claims to have verified his identity via the application by taking himself a picture and using his driver's license. From there, he simply contacted the county clerk to request a mail ballot and explain to him why he should want to use the application rather than the mail.

"The vote is very simple. The presentation of the ballot is similar to a hard copy. So I scrolled through the screen, tapped on the candidates I wanted to vote for, then clicked on Submit at the end. "

Although Secretary Werner admits that the program is still in its infancy and that some problems may arise, technology is absolutely necessary.

"We owe it to our military and our women to give them the opportunity to participate in all elections."