VotingWorks, founded by Ben Adida and Matt Pasternack, involved in pilot with Microsoft for testing new voting technology with Wisconsin in the Spring Primary Feb 2020

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Affected counties involved Rock County and the Town of Fulton. The Wisconsin Elections Commission was a partner as well.

About the team at VotingWorks:

Matt Pasternack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattpasternack/

Former Corps Member, Teach for America

Y Combinator participant

Stanford Law School student

BA History, Yale University

Ben Adida - https://www.linkedin.com/in/benadida/

PhD, Cryptography and Information Security, MIT

Board Member and Former Technical Advisor, Creative Commons

Former Director of Engineering, Square (@Jack)

Former Director of Engineering, Mozilla

Former Advisory Committee Member, W3C

Former Lead Architect, Harvard Medical School (Indivo indivohealth.org, Gene Partnership genepartnership.org, SMArt smartplatforms.org)

John Lilly, Board Member - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnlilly/

Venture Partner, Greylock Partners (invested in Tumblr, Instagram, Dropbox)

Consulting Assistant Professor & Lecturer, Stanford University

Chair, Code for America

Former CEO, Mozilla

Ryan Merkley, Board Member - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanmerkley/

Chief of Staff, Wikimedia Foundation

Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

Former CEO, Creative Commons

Former Chief Strategy Officer & former COO, Mozilla

Former Director of Corporate Communications, 2010 Winter Games for the City of Vancouver

Senior Advisor, Office of the Mayor David Miller, City of Tooronto

|→ Led Mayor's budget policy and development and launch of Toronto Open Data

Former Chief of Staff, Office of Councillor Shelley Carrol, City of Toronto

Former Chief of Staff, Office of Mayor Joe Pantalone, City of Toronto

Former Senior Advisor, Office of Councillor Adam Giambrone, City of Toronto

Former Chief Communications Officer, Engineers Without Borders Canada

>>11621323

VotingWorks, founded by Ben Adida and Matt Pasternack, involved in pilot with Microsoft for testing new voting technology with Wisconsin in the Spring Primary Feb 2020

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About VotingWorks:

VotingWorks, founded in 2018, is a non-partisan non-profit building a secure, affordable, and simple voting system. Our vote-by-mail solution lets you scale vote-by-mail quickly and affordably. Our risk-limiting audit software ensures votes cast on any paper-based system are correctly tabulated. Our voting machine creates paper ballots that voters can directly verify. Our source code is available on GitHub.

VotingWorks worked with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which helped it with its launch. Its mission is to create a new non-profit voting systems manufacturer with the mission of being the public works for open-source voting systems. The basis of this non-profit is from Ben Adida's 254-page PhD dissertation on cryptographic voting systems he wrote in 2006. In the article with Vice, it indicated that Ben studied voting machines for more than 20 years and had a PhD from MIT in secure voting.

About the pilot:

The pilot was to test a Microsoft's voting system called ElectionGuard. This software allows voters to verify that their ballot was counted. It was stated that local election officials would hand-count all paper ballots to verify the winners.

ElectionGuard is noted as an open-source software that any voting equipment maker is free to use in its existing products. ElectionGuard generates a ballot tracking code which voters can use to verify their vote counted in the final tally. Each vote is recorded and encrypted on a touchscreen ballot marking device as well as printed on a paper ballot. Anyone may download the software and test its security. Technical information about ElectionGuard is available on Microsoft’s website. Links: https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard and https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/02/17/wisconsin-electionguard-polls/

VotingWorks modified its systems to integrate ElectionGuard for this pilot test and supplied the ballot marking devices and other supporting voting equipment.

https://urbanmilwaukee.com/pressrelease/wisconsin-partners-with-microsoft-and-votingworks-for-pilot-test-of-new-voting-technology/ / https://archive.vn/nTQzp

https://cdt.org/insights/votingworks-announcement/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mzee/this-mit-phd-wants-to-replace-americas-broken-voting-machines-with-open-source-software-chromebooks-and-ipads

>>11621106

The dominos keep dropping!

BOOM

BOOM

BOOM

Thank you Q! ;)

Microsoft's ElectionGuard team worked with Clear Ballot and Smartmatic

Picture upload isn't working for me, so it's just text for now folks.

It is not confirmed if ElectionGuard was used in this election or not for these two vendors.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/09/24/electionguard-available-today-to-enable-secure-verifiable-voting/

https://archive.vn/mY9ny

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-deploy-electionguard-voting-software-for-the-first-time/

https://archive.vn/eliEA

All in all, the technology behind ElectionGuard is relatively simple and centers around a few core principles:

• People who vote receive a tracking code.

-They can use the tracking code on an election website to verify that their vote has been counted and that the vote has not been altered.

• The tracking code does not reveal the vote, so it won't allow third-parties to see who voted for who.

• ElectionGuard uses a so-called homomorphic encryption scheme developed in-house at Microsoft under Senior Cryptographer Josh Benaloh.

• Homomorphic encryption allows the counting of votes while keeping the votes encrypted.

• The ElectionGuard SDK also supports third-party "verifier" apps to independently check if encrypted votes have been counted properly and not altered.

• Verifier apps were created for voting officials, the media, or any third party interested in the voting process.

-ElectionGuard machines can also produce paper ballots, as a printed record of their vote, which voters can place inside voting boxes, like old-fashioned votes.

• ElectionGuard also supports voting through accessibility hardware, such as Microsoft Surface or the Xbox Adaptive Controller.The voting machines being deployed tomorrow in Fulton were built by VotingWorks.

Other voting machine vendors like Smartmatic and Clear Ballot also announced partnerships with Microsoft to build ElectionGuard-based voting machines last year. A third, Dominion Voting Systems, said it was also exploring using the SDK.

Both Microsoft and VotingWorks will have technical staff on site tomorrow in Fulton, but the companies don't expect any issues.

"We anticipate many more pilots of ElectionGuard technology as we get it ready for prime time," Burt said.

>>11621547

KEK - same here - only text for now