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Not every voter needs to track their ballot to ensure the system maintains its integrity. In fact, if just 1% of voters nationally check that their ballots are correctly encrypted and tallied, it would be almost impossible for anyone to tamper with more than 100 votes out of 100 million without being caught.
At the same time, the way the encrypted votes are tallied can be checked by anyone to make sure that each candidate gets the correct number of votes.
Will anyone be able to see who I have voted for?
No. The principle of secret ballots means that not only should each person’s vote be private, it must be private, so that votes cannot be bought, sold or coerced.
ElectionGuard uses something called homomorphic encryption to ensure that nobody can tell how a person voted. In fact, even the voter cannot use the tracking code to prove to anyone else how they voted – they will only be able to prove that their vote wasn’t changed.
It is also possible to add up encrypted data so that only the final tally can be decrypted. This means that people can check the final tallies without seeing any information about the individual votes.
Will it change the way elections have to be run?
No. ElectionGuard is designed to work with current voting systems, and Microsoft has been working alongside manufacturers and vendors to incorporate it into existing infrastructure (although it won’t be available for the Presidential election in November, and won’t be widely deployed for some time). Paper ballots can be scanned and voting machines used as they are now. The only difference voters will see is the unique tracking code they are given at the end, which they can choose to use or throw in the trash.
Spot checks and administrative audits can be carried out by the members of the existing canvassing boards who currently decide on whether ballots are eligible or spoiled, with built-in safeguards to make sure no individual can either disrupt or influence the verification process.
How can we trust it?
The fundamental principle behind ElectionGuard is that it gives the power to check whether elections are valid to individuals. Every single voter has the ability to verify their own vote – most likely on public websites set up by election boards or local authorities. And anyone can use a verification program to check the final tallies.
Nobody has to just take Microsoft’s word for it – or anyone else’s for that matter. ElectionGuard is a set of open source software components that can be accessed here. Anyone with the programming skills can create their own verification tool. In practice, this means every political party, candidate, news organization or pressure group can run their own checks and make their preferred program publicly available for others.
The first pilot has already been successfully carried out in an election in Fulton, Wisconsin.
Is this just a way of Microsoft making money off elections?
ElectionGuard is not a for-profit enterprise, and Microsoft will make no money from it. The technology is being developed and piloted with multiple stakeholders, and is freely available to anyone who wishes to use it, whether in the U.S. or in democracies around the world.
For more on how technology can be used to protect the integrity of elections, visit Defending Democracy Program And follow @MSFTIssues on Twitter.
https://news.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/27/what-is-electionguard/