evote VS electionguard

For example IBM eVote https://github.com/IBM/evote

This might be something to look into: https://github.com/IBM/evote you should be able to run it completely for free on IBM Cloud.

Here is list of : 3rd party companies that would count votes from real people for a poll that requires each voter to provide a KYC driver's license to vote on a given topic. The cost of verifying each voter's identity is too high for a company to offer this service for free. However, there are a number of companies that would be willing to count votes from real people for a poll that requires each voter to provide a KYC driver's license to vote on a given topic for a fee. These companies typically charge a per-vote fee, and they may also charge an additional fee for verifying each voter's identity. Companies that offer this service include: Company Per-vote fee Verification fee ElectionGuard $0.05 $0.10 Voatz $0.10 $0.25 Democracy Live $0.10 $0.50 FollowMyVote $0.15 $0.50 ElectionGuard - Open Source https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard

Advances in digital voting are being made - ElectionGuard, but they’re still not at the point of being used in very large scale statewide or national elections.

Securely and transparently voting and counting the vote should not be this difficult in the 21st century. There are Open Source standards like ElectionGuard which could be used to build standard and auditable voting platforms devoid of proprietary black box corporate profit motive drive secrecy. Given the current divided nature of our country the slimiest margins of electoral victory will determine policy and more, not less, transparency is required to increase trust in our electoral processes.

Have a look at the links I shared above, particularly https://verifiedvoting.org/votingequipment/ for a quick summary; it gives some analysis of different voting equipment and concerns thereof.

In particular, purely-digital systems are widely regarded to be too vulnerable to hacking to be safe. What you're describing sounds like DRE with VVPAT, which isn't considered to be a secure option, though it's better than DRE without VPAT since as you note you can in principle audit it. (However, note that most jurisdictions don't yet do RLAs to randomly audit, so right now digitizing, even with VPAT, could weaken the system.)

I think the basic idea here is -- if paper is secure and will be your fallback, and digital is insecure, you should just build your process to be optimized for paper-first, rather than digital-first. Digitizing as you suggest doesn't really gain anything over paper (except perhaps reporting provisional results faster, but you'd still need to do a risk-limiting audit to verify that your digital votes didn't get hacked so this might be a wash), but it does add more attack surfaces along the chain of custody.

Ultimately, paper is a very robust solution to the problem of making the system hard to subvert at scale; you can think of it as a sort of "proof of work", where it would be extremely difficult for, say, Russia, or the DNC / RNC to tamper with large quantities of ballots across the nation. Compare that robustness with a digital system, where IF it works you have the same properties... but around here we all know that almost all digital systems can be owned by a persistent enough adversary.

If you're willing to relax some of the requirements around refutability, there are some interesting e-voting schemes, for example you can do some cool stuff with homomorphic encryption like https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard/. But there is something to be said for having a tallying algorithm like "count the pieces of paper" that doesn't require a PhD to understand.

There are a lot of variations on this, so I'm going to assume we're talking about how Microsoft's ElectionGuard project would work in the context of a ballot marking device. (I've written some of the code being used in ElectionGuard.)

If you exclusively rely on technology then yeah, it's a recipe for disaster. We can't simply ignore technology because of its flaws, it can also bring some positive improvements to the democratic process if combined with multiple layers of verifications. Each of these layers should be interdependent to ensure the integrity of the process.

I found this a while ago https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard, this seems like a good step forward to improve transparency in the process and would allow everyone to confidentially verify that their vote was effectively counted.

I made a $100 donation. I live in Seattle. I happen to work for Microsoft. I shared info about the initiative with my team members and a group that works on open source voting software, so probably quite a few MSFT people in the area heard about it and donated.

If Oregonians really want to get serious about the election fraud issue (which almost certainly is a non-existent issue here in Oregon) there is 100% fraud-proof election techniques, one of which is sponsored by Microsoft and is called ElectionGuard. It's a open-source completely secure method to ensure election integrity, both at the individual level (you can ensure your specific vote was counted) and at the social level.

There's also the much bigger question of what Windows and most Linux distributions are trying to accomplish. Windows is a commercial product that people purchase to meet some need/function, while Linux distros tend to be community-driven software efforts. For many Linux users just the fact the Windows is closed source means they won't use it, since they don't trust software that's not available/auditable by the public. Even Microsoft has open sourced its ElectionGuard voting software, since it's really the only way to prove to the public that the voting software does what they say it's supposed to do. At the moment people aren't demanding that same level of scrutiny of closed source OSs and desktop software, but my feeling is they probably should since personal and financial data is being used on that type of software.