Microsoft to Reward Hackers for Finding Bugs in Open Source Election Software
October 18, 2019Mohit Kumar
Fair elections are the lifelines of democracy, but in recent years election hacking has become a hot topic worldwide. Whether it's American voting machines during the 2016 presidential election or India's EVMs during 2014 general elections, the integrity, transparency, and security of electronic voting machines remained questionable, leaving a wound in the minds of many that is difficult to heal. Many countries, including the largest democracy in the world i.e., India, believe the best way to ensure the security of EVMs is to make its technology opaque to bad actors, but in recent years a large section of the population is losing trust in any system that has been certified by a closed group of experts only. To make a balance between transparency and security, in May 2019, Microsoft released a free, open-source software development kit (SDK) called ElectionGuard that aims to enable end-to-end verification of voting. Microsoft's ElectionGuard SDK can be integra
