Microsoft offers software tools to secure elections

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Microsoft has announced an ambitious effort to make voting secure, verifiable and subject to reliable audits by registering ballots in encrypted form so they can be accurately and independently tracked long after they are cast.

Two of the three top U.S elections vendors have expressed interest in potentially incorporating the open-source software into their voting systems.

The software is being developed with Galois, an Oregon-based company separately creating a secure voting system prototype under contract with the Pentagon's advanced research agency, DARPA.

Dubbed "ElectionGuard", it will be available this summer, Microsoft says, with early prototypes ready to pilot for next year's U.S. general elections.

Midterm Election Ballots Still Being Counted In Palm Beach County, Florida /VCG Photo

CEO Satya Nadella announced the initiative Monday at a developer's conference in Seattle, saying the software development kit would help "modernize all of the election infrastructures everywhere in the world."

Three little-known U.S. companies control about 90 percent of the market for election equipment but have long faced criticism for poor security, antiquated technology and insufficient transparency around their proprietary, black-box voting systems.

A National Academies of Science report published last year has called for an urgent overhaul of the rickety U.S. election system, which Russian hackers infiltrated in 2016 in several states.

That report called for all U.S. elections to be held on human-readable paper ballots by 2020. It also advocated a specific form of routine post-election audits to ensure accurate vote counts – a requirement that "end-to-end" voting verification satisfies.

Visitors stop at a stand of the European Parliament prior to European parliamentary elections May 6, 2019 in Berlin, Germany. /VCG Photo

Election integrity activist Susan Greenhalgh of the National Election Defense Coalition said she hoped it would encourage innovative thinking at the level elections are actually managed.

"We can't have faith-based voting anymore," she said. "This is a great step forward in verifying election results."

ElectionGuard will let voters confirm that their votes are accurately recorded. Beyond that, the unique coded tracker it produces registers an encrypted version of the vote that keeps the ballot choice itself secret while ensuring votes are accurately counted.

That enables reliable post-election audits and recounts.

It also lets outsiders such as election watchdog groups, political parties, journalists – and voters themselves – verify online that votes are properly counted without being altered.

Source(s): AP