Jane Edwards
Microsoft has introduced an open-source platform designed to make elections more secure and allow voters to privately track their votes.
ElectionGuard is a free software development kit under the company’s Defending Democracy Program meant to enable third-party organizations and voters to validate election results, Tom Burt, corporate vice president for customer security and trust at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post published Monday.
The SDK uses homomorphic encryption techniques developed by Microsoft Research and supports risk-limiting audits to ensure election accuracy.
The company developed the platform with Galois, which secured $10M in funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a demonstration voting tool for use in secure hardware assessment.
Microsoft will make ElectionGuard available this summer via GitHub and conduct pilot testing of the platform during the 2020 U.S. elections.
