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Microsoft OS platform aims to make elections more secure

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 09 May 2019

As South Africans went to the polls yesterday to cast their votes in the country's sixth democratic national and provincial elections, Microsoft launched an open source platform designed to make digital voting systems, such as those used in the US, more secure.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the availability of ElectionGuard, a free open source software development kit (SDK), at this week's Microsoft Build developer conference in Seattle.

According to Tom Burt, corporate VP, customer security and trust, ElectionGuard is part of Microsoft's "Defending Democracy Programme", which the company launched last year in the wake of growing concerns that elections in the US and other democratic countries were at risk from hacking, fake news and social media disinformation campaigns.

There have been widespread allegations that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 US presidential election with the goal of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political or social discord in the US.

Investigations led to criminal charges (indictments) against 26 Russian citizens and three Russian organisations; as well as indictments and convictions of some Trump campaign officials.

While this interference was allegedly related only to influencing voters, there has also been growing concern about the use of electronic voting machines which are said to be open to manipulation and failure: adding and subtracting votes not cast by voters; changing voters' choices on the screen; giving voters the wrong ballot; failing on election day despite passing pre-election testing; breaking down; and even reversing election outcomes.

"ElectionGuard will make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it's used in the United States or in democratic nations around the world," Burt wrote in a blog providing more details about the platform.

Developed in association with Galois, which secured funds from the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a demonstration voting tool for use in secure hardware assessment, 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", he added.

In virtually every South African election since 1994, there have been allegations and rumours of vote-tampering, ranging from ballot boxes being stuffed with pre-marked votes, to full ballot boxes being dumped.

In this election (as in previous elections) social media warnings have been flowing thick and fast to voters to check their ballot paper bears the Independent Electoral Commission stamp, without which the ballot paper will be declared invalid.

There have also been warnings that marked ballot papers may be changed and voters have therefore been urged to photograph their marked ballot in order to "verify" how they voted and ensure their vote cannot be changed. However, it is in fact illegal to photograph your marked ballot paper.

As voting proceeded yesterday, there were also allegations that some voters had taken the "vote-early-vote-often" joke to heart and had indeed done just that. The allegations are being investigated.

Would something like ElectionGuard help in SA with its manual voting system?

According to Burt, ElectionGuard is not intended to replace the paper ballot, but rather to supplement and improve systems that rely on them. It is also not designed to support Internet voting.

"ElectionGuard is a new tool for use by the existing election community and government entities that run elections. It can be used to build systems ... that will protect the vote against tampering by anyone, and improve the voting process for citizens and officials," he said.

In addition to allowing voters and third-party organisations to verify election results, the system is secure (it is built using advanced encryption techniques); auditable; and built with tools that make the voting experience better; it utilises free, flexible open source technology that has the ability to be used with off-the-shelf hardware.

The ElectionGuard SDK is to be made available through GitHub. "Microsoft will not charge for using ElectionGuard and will not profit from partnering with election technology suppliers that incorporate it into their products," Burt concluded.

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