Microsoft's ElectionGuard technology lands a strategic partner, inches closer to defending democracy

Somehow, the simple act of casting a vote in an election has get the center of national headaches and outrage. Between a former U.S. president who claimed 2022'due south presidential election was rigged and lawmakers enacting voting policies that some claim are discriminatory in nature, the countless screaming over ballot casting has never been louder (if we ignore the centuries of debates over which demographics are allowed to vote and but pay attention to the last x years). That's why Microsoft is working to brand voting secure, efficient, accessible, and transparent.

In 2022, as office of its loftily titled Defending Democracy Plan, Microsoft introduced ElectionGuard, software that the company claimed would enable "finish-to-end verification of elections, open results to third-party organizations for secure validation, and allow individual voters to ostend their votes were correctly counted."

Fast-forward to today. Microsoft has now appear its partnership with Hart InterCivic. Hart will integrate ElectionGuard into its products, which ways that it'll be the starting time big U.Southward. voting organisation vendor to apply Microsoft's election-minded software.

"The team at Hart has washed exceptional work to combine the benefits of a newspaper ballot-based voting arrangement with the best the ElectionGuard technology has to offering," said Microsoft's Tom Burt, corporate vice president of client security and trust. "We're excited that voters will be able to experience the confidence ElectionGuard can bring to the process while voting on machines from a visitor that has been supporting elections for more than than a century."

ElectionGuard being instated in standard polling stations for, say, a U.S. presidential election is yet a long style off, given that it's been 2 years since the software's announcement and it'due south simply now entering the pilot phase. The road to anything beingness officially injected into U.S. voting procedures usually isn't a quick one, so it may be a while before Microsoft's efforts deport fruit. Still, it's getting closer to, in its own words, defending democracy.

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