Microsoft tests an open source electronic voting machine to guard against hacks

Microsoft will test its new open source electronic voting system next week in a local election in Wisconsin. 

Called ElectionGuard, the system has been developed over several years to dissuade hackers from trying to alter electronic votes. 

Microsoft has partnered with the Wisconsin Elections Commission to test ElectionGuard in an upcoming election in Fulton, Wisconsin, a town with 500 registered voters that will be voting for new school board members and a local judge.

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Microsoft’s ElectionGuard is an electronic voting system designed to thwart hackers with end-to-end encryption and by having voters verify their selections with QR codes after they’ve left the polls

‘We hope this pilot test will give us further insights into how the system works and whether voters like it,’ the Elections Commission’s Meagan Wolfe told CNet. 

‘We can use this data as we try to make elections in Wisconsin even more secure, usable and accessible’.

ElectionGuard is an open source tool that works with any recent Microsoft Windows system. 

It uses a simple touchscreen interface to record a user’s vote, then encrypts the data, recording the choice to a main server or monitoring system. 

After registering their vote, the user will get two printout sheets showing their choices -one of which is meant to be placed in a ballot box at the polling station as a backup to compare against the final tally of digital votes.

ElectionGuard will be tested in a local Wisconsin election next week, in a town of 500 registered voters who’ll choose new members of the school board and a local judge

The other copy is to be taken home by the voter and used to later verify their vote was accurately registered by the system, which they can check by scanning a QR code from the printout. 

According to Microsoft, the system isn’t necessarily meant to prevent hacking, but rather make it easy to identify whether a vote has been changed that attempting to do so will be pointless. 

If the voters themselves don’t catch potentially fishy behavior when they verify their own ballots, the end-to-end encryption will make it easy to track differences in the final vote by unencrypting the original input to see if anything’s changed.  

At least, that’s the theory for how it all should work.

Election experts say it will be years before the system is ready for a major election -2024 at the earliest. 

‘We’re basically trying to test in a very controlled environment where the outcome of the election is in no way dependent on the technology,’ Microsoft’s Tom Burt said of the upcoming Fulton election.

‘We just want to test, ‘How does it work? What can we learn? What we need to change and improve?’

In previous tests, only 6.6 percent of voters noticed that their choices hadn’t been properly logged by the system, but Microsoft says just the capacity to easily track altered votes could be enough to dissuade hackers

One potential problem is the system’s reliance on voters themselves to follow up to ensure their own choices were properly registered.

An earlier mock election designed to test the system showed that just 6.6 percent of voters told poll workers there was a problem with their vote, despite the system being rigged so that every vote would have some inconsistency. 

Microsoft hopes that simply having the capacity to easily trace hacks will be enough of a disincentive for hackers, even if many voters might ultimately be too lazy to actually follow up.   

‘If you can’t stop the hack, the second-best thing is to know that you’ve been hacked,’ Microsoft’s RC Carter said. ‘This is exactly what this does’.