September 5, 2024 at 06:43AM
The ElectionGuard project, initiated by Microsoft, aims to enable voters and election observers to verify election results. It employs encryption processes to encrypt ballots and allow verification of tallies by voters, administrators, guardians, and verifiers. This technology has been tested in smaller elections in the US and internationally and is seen as crucial to building trust in election processes.
The meeting notes highlight the efforts of the ElectionGuard project initiated by Microsoft in 2018, intending to ensure the verifiability and integrity of election results. The project, presented by Microsoft and Rice University, introduces an open-source approach to create a verifiable audit trail that can reassure voters of the accuracy of an election’s outcome.
ElectionGuard aims to enhance trust in elections by allowing voters and observers to verify the accuracy of the results. The system employs a flexible set of encryption processes, with the goal of making elections verifiable for all participants, including voters, administrators, guardians, and verifiers.
Despite the potential for increased trust, the project will not be deployed for the 2024 US presidential election, as officials are typically reluctant to implement anything new before a major election. However, ElectionGuard has been utilized in smaller, local elections in the US and has been piloted in international settings as well.
The project’s success is contingent on addressing key challenges, such as the high computational cost and the need for fast libraries to ensure usability is not impacted at the voting booth. The original Python software development kit (SDK) has been rewritten in Rust and Kotlin for use in ElectionGuard 2.0 to mitigate these issues.
While the project has made progress in incorporating mail-in ballots and ranked choice voting, these approaches are not yet implemented in the current SDK. Moving forward, the ElectionGuard team is optimistic and hopes that next year will be a good time for election officials to adopt this technology more broadly, following successful trials in smaller-scale elections.