Microsoft‘s open-source voting integrity software ElectionGuard will support a new initiative aimed at improving the transparency and security of U.S. and international elections.
Ginny Badanes, senior director of Microsoft’s Democracy Forward initiative, said in a blog post published Friday that ElectionGuard will be the first project of the Election Technology Initiative, a project led by the Council of State Governments and The Turnout.
ETI will start with incorporating, developing and enhancing ElectionGuard and continue to test the software through pilot elections, the next of which is set to be held in November in College Park, Maryland.
Microsoft unveiled ElectionGuard in 2019 as a free open-source software development kit designed to secure votes placed on electronic voting machines.
“The aim of the project was to enable end-to-end verification of elections, open results to third-party organizations for secure validation, and allow individual voters to confirm their votes were correctly counted,” Badanes said.
ElectionGuard was developed through Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program in partnership with Galois.
