Can Our Ballots Be Both Secret and Secure?

Source: The New Yorker

“In July, 2019, the Galois team, with Dodds as its lead programmer, successfully rendered Benaloh’s math as a software package that other developers could use to integrate end-to-end verification into actual voting systems. To facilitate its adoption by venders, ElectionGuard was uploaded to GitHub, a Microsoft-owned online repository for open-source software. Open source allows anyone to study the code, comment on its architecture, and look for errors. The code is also there for the taking, offered freely to whoever wants to use or modify it. This accessibility reflected Benaloh’s and Burt’s desire to see end-to-end verifiable election systems propagated far and wide. “We’re not getting paid, and we deliberately designed it to be platform-independent,” Burt said. “What we want is for elections to be secure, right?” According to Kiniry, so far, commentators have suggested more than forty edits and modifications to the code.