Microsoft hopes its technology will help Americans trust voting again

Story by Clare Duffy, CNN Business Video by Bronte Lord & Bryce Urbany, CNN Business 1 day ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/microsoft-hopes-its-technology-will-help-americans-trust-voting-again/ar-BB10ha2E

When voters in Fulton, Wisconsin, arrived to cast their ballots in a local election Tuesday, the voting process looked a little different.

The company has made the software's code free and publicly available.

Most security experts agree that creating a truly unhackable system is impossible.

"There's nothing that I can do — that anyone can do, for that matter — to ensure there's no meddling," said Josh Benaloh, the senior cryptographer at Microsoft who developed the mechanism underlying ElectionGuard.

For that reason, ElectionGuard is designed to be "tamper evident."

"It doesn't assume that the devices can't be hacked, because that's a foolish assumption" Microsoft's Burt said. "But what it does do is it says: Even if it does (get hacked), how can we make it pointless for them to do that?"

Each vote is individually secured using a process called "homomorphic encryption." Individually encrypting votes protects voter privacy and discourages meddling. If a bad actor wanted to preference a certain candidate, they would have to do the difficult work of decrypting each vote in order to even know which votes to change, Benaloh said.