Microsoft Wants To Make Voting More Trustworthy. This Partnership Will Help
Microsoft wants to make voting more trustworthy. This partnership will help
Microsoft conducted the first official test of its ElectionGuard voting security software in late February 2020 in Fulton, Wisconsin, during an election for the local school board and a state supreme court seat. The software, developed as part of the tech giant's "Defending Democracy" initiative, is intended to assist in making elections more secure and trustworthy.
More than a year later, widespread distrust and division surrounding the 2020 presidential election have aided in establishing the case for this type of technology.
"I don't believe there has ever been a more critical time in history for vendors to integrate this technology into their systems," Tom Burt, Microsoft's corporate vice president of customer security and trust, told CNN Business.
Microsoft (MSFT) announced the first implementation of ElectionGuard with a major voting technology vendor in the United States, Hart InterCivic, on Thursday. Hart, one of the country's three largest election vendors, provides its voting system to election officials in over 500 jurisdictions across 17 states.
Hart will become the first major election technology vendor to offer voters end-to-end verification that their ballots were counted correctly, the companies said.
Hart has already begun discussions with the election officials it serves regarding the possibility of testing the ElectionGuard software during upcoming elections. Microsoft hopes that the technology will eventually gain widespread adoption in time for the 2024 presidential election.
"We believe that we must constantly reimagine how technology can improve voting security while also increasing transparency, and this partnership with Microsoft is a significant step in that direction," said Julie Mathis, CEO of Hart InterCivic.
For voters, Hart's voting process will remain largely unchanged: voters will fill out a paper ballot or select their choices on a machine and print them out at designated polling locations. After that, they will scan their paper ballot with a Hart scanner. Only now, that scanner will be equipped with ElectionGuard software, which will immediately encrypt the ballots upon scanning.
ElectionGuard and Benefits
ElectionGuard secures each vote individually using a technique called "homomorphic encryption" — after polls close, this encryption enables tally of votes and decryption of results without decrypting individual ballots.
This significantly reduces the likelihood of vote tampering: if a bad actor desired to change votes, they would have to perform the difficult task of decrypting each vote in order to determine which votes to change.
Election officials may also run a verifier application following the close of polls to determine whether votes have been tampered with. Due to the encryption process, if no votes are tampered with, the equation will produce the expected result. If the answer is different, election officials should verify the election results using duplicate paper ballots.
The software is predicated on the premise that it is impossible to completely avoid a bad actor compromising a voting system. Thus, ElectionGuard ensures that if a hack occurs, election officials are notified immediately and prepared with alternate methods of vote counting, removing incentives for election meddling.
Preventing such interference is a primary objective for election officials. The US government discovered that adversaries such as Iran and Russia attempted to influence the 2020 presidential election in order to undermine voter confidence in the democratic process.
Another critical feature of the ElectionGuard software is the ability of individual voters to verify that their vote was correctly counted. Each voter will receive a code to use the following day to verify their ballot — the same verifier application that verifies there was no vote tampering can also verify for voters that their ballot was tallied correctly.
In Conclusion
"For those who are distrustful, providing them with the ability to verify that their vote was counted represents a significant potential shift in trust," Burt said Thursday.
ElectionGuard is a free, open-source program developed by Microsoft as a non-profit initiative.
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