Posted on 05/07/2019 1:49:59 PM PDT by dayglored
In brief: Microsoft said ElectionGuard isn’t mean to replace paper ballots but rather, supplement and improve systems that rely on them. It also isn’t designed to support Internet voting, so there’s some reassurance there for those that aren’t yet convinced of such technologies.
Microsoft is expanding its Defending Democracy Program with a new product called ElectionGuard. Announced at Build 2019 today, ElectionGuard is a free, open source SDK that Microsoft is developing in partnership with Portland-based Galois that is designed to boost the security and public verifiability of elections.
ElectionGuard isn’t a standalone voting system but rather, an “add-on” of sorts for existing systems. According to Microsoft, it’ll enable end-to-end verification of elections, allow individual voters to confirm their votes were correctly counted and open results to third-party organizations for validation.
TechCrunch provides additional insight into how the system will work:
The platform would sit underneath existing voting systems, and when a voter casts their ballot, the data would be entered in the ordinary fashion in a state’s election systems, but also in ElectionGuard. The voter would then be given a tracking code that lets them see that their vote has been, say, recorded locally at the correct polling place, or perhaps that it has been sent on to state authorities for auditing.
Critically, this is done without the voting administration or Microsoft knowing how any individual actually voted through a cryptographic process called homomorphic encryption that allows mathematical processes – like counting – to be done on data that is still encrypted. Senior cryptographer Josh Benaloh has been pioneering Microsoft’s use of homomorphic encryption in election systems, the company said.
Microsoft has partnered with several leading election technology providers to pilot the service and will make the ElectionGuard SDK available on GitHub this summer. They’re also working to build a reference voting system to showcase ElectionGuard’s capabilities.
The SDK’s reference implementation will additionally provide guidance on how to set up a system on a Windows 10 platform for maximum security. It’ll even include an application for integrating an Xbox Adaptive Controller to improve accessibility for those with disabilities.
What will happen when our election becomes too slow to count and then gives the elector jail collage a blue screen of death?
“And you are going to believe the code they show you is the code compiled and installed on the machines? Or if someone does a last minute update?”
How are we doing it now? I’d imagine this is a step toward accountability, but I could be wrong.
For someone opinionated as myself I should be knowledgable on this topic and have ideas. But I am a bit stumped.
I want to believe there is a safe and secure way to do this electronically where everything is verifiably done by the books, but I can’t say how.
Perhaps indelible ink and day-of voting works best. Even then, how are we sure our vote counted the way we meant it to be?
Somewhere it seems we lost that underlying prerequisite for representative government: people who believe in the idea enough not to cheat.
“And you are going to believe the code they show you is the code compiled and installed on the machines? Or if someone does a last minute update?”
How are we doing it now? I’d imagine this is a step toward accountability, but I could be wrong.
For someone opinionated as myself I should be knowledgable on this topic and have ideas. But I am a bit stumped.
I want to believe there is a safe and secure way to do this electronically where everything is verifiably done by the books, but I can’t say how.
Perhaps indelible ink and day-of voting works best. Even then, how are we sure our vote counted the way we meant it to be?
Somewhere it seems we lost that underlying prerequisite for representative government: people who believe in the idea enough not to cheat.
“When was the last time YOU inspected any open-source program source, in enough detail to catch subtle security holes?”
Good point. But I do believe that the more there is at stake the more people do get involved. Plus, there would be many groups / organizations who would spend money verifying the code. There would be money offered to locate the security holes and publish them in order to fix them.
Big software companies do this now, and some people make a very nice living at it.
Honestly though, the more I think about the issues surrounding voting security the more I realize how woefully ignorant I am about such an important subject.
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