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Microsoft Research Summit 2021 • Videos

Tutorial, Research talk, and Q&A: ElectionGuard: Enabling voters to verify election integrity

00:00 Tutorial: ElectionGuard: Enabling voters to verify election integrity
Speaker: Josh Benaloh, Senior Principal Cryptographer, Microsoft Research Redmond

This tutorial will describe Microsoft’s free, open-source ElectionGuard toolkit, which can be incorporated into new and existing voting systems to enable voters to check for themselves that their votes have been accurately counted. We’ll explore how the technology works, where it’s being used in actual public elections, and how faculty and students can work with the tools and contribute to the project. When used, ElectionGuard produces a detailed record of encrypted votes and other public artifacts that can be published for all to review. ElectionGuard depends upon independent verifiers of this public record to ensure integrity of an election. The process of writing an app to perform this verification constitutes a viable class assignment or independent project that can be both rewarding and educational.

42:58 Research talk: ElectionGuard: Implementations and future directions
Speaker: Dan S. Wallach, Professor, Rice University

This talk will describe the growing ElectionGuard software ecosystem and where it’s going. Today, we have a full “reference” implementation of the ElectionGuard specification in Python, as well as a more limited implementation in C and C++, which is suitable for embedding into some kinds of voting system hardware devices. In addition, we now have a version of ElectionGuard meant for a short class project in a university-level computer security or cryptography course (in Python or Kotlin). Several other open-source developers have reimplemented ElectionGuard, giving us implementations in Java and Haskell. These diverse implementations will enable a variety of applications beyond just casting encrypted votes and tabulating them, such as improved security and transparency for election audits.

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