The West Virginia Secretary of State office has said that someone tried to gain access to its blockchain-based mobile voting pilot in May 2018. This pilot allowed military members oversees who are residents of Harrison or Monongalia countries to use the Voatz app to vote. Voatz suspects that the hacker was a student from the University of Michigan, according to a report by Yahoo Finance.

The Voatz app links a user's identity to their smartphone using a fingerprint or facial recognition and then uses between four and 16 nodes on a permissioned blockchain to verify ballots. Although the hacker tried to gain access to the system, they were allegedly unsuccessful, according to a press release from West Virginia's Secretary of State Mac Warner.

"Every safeguard designed for the system was very successful and worked as designed: to gain as much information as possible, and protect the sanctity of the voters' identities and ballots,"  Warner said in the release. "Although the details of the investigation cannot be disclosed, we can say that no votes were altered, impacted, viewed or in any way tampered with."