By Pascal Oparada (Social Media/Tech Reporter)
Microsoft has become the first tech company to take on election malpractice by launching ElectionGuard which promises to make the process more secure and transparent.
It is free and open source.
The platform would complete would be made available this summer and would be piloted during the 2020 general elections in the U.S.
It is not a voting machine, but rather a platform for handling voting data that can either empower existing systems or have new ones built on it.
The idea is to let voters track their votes securely and privately, while also allowing authorities to tabulate, store, and if necessary, audit them.
“ElectionGuard provides a complete implementation of end-to-end verifiable elections. It is designed to
work with systems that use paper ballots, supplementing today’s tabulation process by providing a
means of public verification of the accuracy of reported results,” Microsoft said.
The platform would sit under existing voting systems. When a voter casts their ballot, the data would be entered in an ordinary fashion in a state’s election systems and also in ElectionGuard. The voter would then be given a tracking code that allows them to see that their vote has been sent to state authorities for auditing.
Meanwhile, the ElectionGuard databases are securely recording all votes and tabulating them. The process would happen in parallel with existing tabulation process.
In auditing, random ballots could be selected from the database and compared with the paper ballots which will provide a quick way to see if, for instance, a machine error in one area was throwing off some results.
Microsoft will send the result via a cryptographic technique known as homomorphic encryption. This allows a system to perform mathematical operations on encrypted data without decrypting it, making interference exfiltration of that sensitive data next to impossible.
Microsoft worked together with Galois to develop ElectionGuard, a company that has been working on election security for years and recently received a $10 million grant from DARPA to pursue secure voting hardware.