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Microsoft tests software to ensure votes are not altered
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IANS | 19 Feb, 2020
Microsoft has begun testing its
free open-source software called "ElectionGuard" in a small Wisconsin
town in the US that aims to make voting more secure, verifiable and
efficient.
"ElectionGuard" will enable end-to-end verification of
elections, open results to third-party organisations for secure
validation, and allow individual voters to confirm their votes were
correctly counted.
It enables government entities, news outlets,
human rights organisations or anyone else to build additional verifiers
that independently can certify election results have been accurately
counted and have not been altered, according to the company.
The software would create a paper trail and assure voters their votes were properly tallied.
"On
Tuesday, Fulton residents are using the technology while choosing who
will join the local school board and hold a seat on Wisconsin's state
Supreme Court," reports CNBC.
With the test, the company aims to see if voters like the experience and make sure everything works fine.
In May last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced "ElectionGuard".
According
to Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President, Customer Security and Trust,
voting system manufacturers will be free to build ElectionGuard into
their systems in a variety of ways.
"These are exciting steps
that enable individual voters to confirm their vote was properly
counted, and assures those voters using an ElectionGuard system of the
most secure and trustworthy vote in the history of the US," Burt said in
a recent blog post.
"ElectionGuard" is not intended to replace
paper ballots but rather to supplement and improve systems that rely on
them, and it is not designed to support internet voting.
The
software provides each voter a tracker with a unique code that can be
used to follow an encrypted version of the vote through the entire
election process via a web portal provided by election authorities.
During
the process of vote-casting, voters have an optional step that allows
them to confirm that their trackers and encrypted votes accurately
reflect their selections.
But once a vote is cast, neither the
tracker nor any data provided through the web portal can be used to
reveal the contents of the vote.
After the election is complete,
the tracker codes can be used by voters to confirm that their votes were
not altered or tampered with and that they were properly counted, said
Microsoft.
On the security front, "ElectionGuard" uses something
called homomorphic encryption - which enables mathematical procedures
"like counting - to be done with fully encrypted data".
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