FTT GalaxyMicrosoft is collaborating with the voting machine maker Hart on election security
The security of voting machines is a growing concern after a number of issues during the last two presidential elections in the United States, but Microsoft is looking to do its part to dispel doubts about the legitimacy of the results, as it announced a partnership with Hart InterCivic, one of the three largest suppliers of voting machines. Elections in the United States, to implement Microsoft's ElectionGuard.
ElectionGuard allows voters to ensure that their votes are correctly counted (and not altered) through end-to-end verification, and third-party election security experts can build their own election audit software through ElectionGuard.
Hart will test ElectionGuard in its real voting system, which is used by more than 500 jurisdictions in 17 states, and voters will still use the touch screen and print their selections or fill out a ballot, and once their ballot papers are scanned to the truth, ElectionGuard will then test and encrypt them.
Voters will then receive a verification code, which they can use to check online that their ballots have been correctly counted. Microsoft says the content of the voter's ballot paper was not disclosed during this process and will remain confidential.
While Microsoft has been working on the technology for a few years and made ElectionGuard open-source and publicly available in 2019 with the goal of making the voting process in the United States more transparent, Hart is the first major voting machine maker to integrate the software. Perhaps if it works as promised and is used widely enough in the 2024 presidential campaign, ElectionGuard will help quell future conspiracy theories about the election results.