
ElectionGuard – A free open-source voting SDK - thaleshonda
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/05/06/protecting-democratic-elections-though-secure-verifiable-voting/
======
maze-le
It may not be a popular opinion around here, but the best election guard is
doing them with pen & paper.

~~~
shinigami
It's a terrible idea. Paper-only elections are easily corrupted. The right
answer is combining paper & electronic.

~~~
mises
But tampering with a paper-only election requires physical interference and
working across many different locations. It is much easier, if you have the
talent, to break into an electronic election.

~~~
xmprt
That's why you use both. Paper for tallying and electronic for auditing. I
used to think electronics wouldn't help but now I'm starting to be convinced.

~~~
scj
Tallying is only a problem if polling stations are overcrowded.

The simpler solution is to hire more counters. I can't imagine that'd be more
expensive than developing custom hardware & software.

~~~
maltalex
Also less expensive than transporting and deploying an enormous amount of
computers and networking equipment on Election Day.

------
gregmac
> The ElectionGuard SDK will be available through GitHub beginning this
> summer. We encourage the election technology community to begin building
> offerings based on this technology and expect early prototypes using
> ElectionGuard will be ready for piloting during the 2020 elections in the
> United States, with significant deployments for subsequent election cycles.

Where is the "we invite interested developers and groups to audit this code
and try to build exploits" stage?

> recently received $10 million in funding from DARPA to build a demonstration
> voting system

and maybe with a bounty reward program?

Then again, maybe because this is more of a reference implementation designed
to be incorporated into other products (MIT license) maybe the only thing that
matters is how the final implementation is done?

~~~
pfranz
My understanding from previous articles is that the DARPA grant went to coming
up with the architecture and spec, then vendors would do the actual
implementation. This looks like middleware.

From this random coder's perspective, the architecture previously designed
sounded good. Voting and tallying were two separate systems. A physical, user-
decipherable, paper that the voter carries over connected the two (it sounded
something between a QR code and scan-tron).

It's good to see an open source codebase that multiple vendors would implement
against.

------
ElijahLynn
Love that there is more movement around solving this. Paper ballots DO NOT
allow a voter to verify there vote was counted and is a huge issue with TRUST.
Allowing users to verify their votes (however it happens) COULD have a big
impact in voter participation.

Looking forward to seeing this movement keep advancing.

------
Mankaninen
There is one more problem with encrypted elections not yet listed here; the
vote is secret for now but 5, 10 or 20 years later it will be easy to break.

This might mostly be a problem for those then powerful, if someone find out
that they voted "wrong" long time ago, our trust in them will be reduced. Yet
a way to do negative campaigning.

------
ch
Cool use of Hom encryption, but does nothing about disenfranchisement.

~~~
bradbeattie
Gerrymandering, preference distortion through no proportional voting systems,
Duverger's Law. I mean, I'm glad people are working on the problem-space of
democracy, but I'd guess that other issues more greatly effect voter
disenfranchisement and apathy.

~~~
jlev
The problem in 2016 wasn't that anyone "hacked" our election, it's that they
hacked our electorate. Turns out that people's opinions are much easier to
change than cast ballots.

------
tzs
How does this compare to Scantegrity [1]?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity)

------
johnklos
Holy cow. This is like using inmates to process rape kits.

