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East Oregonian
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Tuesday, May 7, 2019
Microsoft offers software tools to secure elections
By FRANK BAJAK
Associated Press
Microsoft announced an
ambitious effort it says will
make voting secure, ver-
ifiable and subject to reli-
able audits. Two of the three
top U.S elections vendors
have expressed interest in
potentially
incorporating
the open-source software
into their proprietary voting
systems.
The software kit is being
developed with Galois, an
Oregon-based
company
separately creating a secure
voting system prototype
under contract with the Pen-
tagon’s advanced research
agency, DARPA.
Dubbed
“Elec-
tionGuard,” the Microsoft
kit will be available this
summer, the company says,
with early prototypes ready
to pilot for next year’s gen-
eral elections. CEO Satya
Nadella announced the
initiative Monday at a
developer’s conference in
Seattle.
Nadella said the project’s
software, provided free of
charge as part of Microsoft’s
Defending Democracy Pro-
gram, would help “modern-
ize all of the election infra-
structure everywhere in
the world.” Microsoft also
announced a cut-rate Office
365 application suite for
political parties and cam-
AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers the keynote address at
Build, the company’s annual conference for software devel-
opers on Monday in Seattle.
both expressed interest in
partnering with Micro-
soft for ElectionGuard. A
spokeswoman for a third
vendor, Dominion Voting
Systems of Denver, said the
company looks forward to
“learning more” about the
initiative.
Anyone with an existing
voting system or develop-
ing a new one will be able
to incorporate the Elec-
tionGuard development kit
— at the state or local level
in the U.S. or national level
for jurisdictions abroad.
“It can be used with a
ballot-marking device. It
can be used with an optical
scanner, on hand-marked
paper ballots,” said Josh
Benaloh, a senior cryp-
tographer at Microsoft
Research and key contrib-
paigns for what it charges
nonprofits. Both Micro-
soft and Google provide
anti-phishing email support
for campaigns.
Three little-known U.S.
companies control about
90 percent of the market
for election equipment, but
have long faced criticism for
poor security, antiquated
technology and insufficient
transparency around their
proprietary, black-box vot-
ing systems. Open-source
software is inherently more
secure because the under-
lying code is easily scru-
tinized by outside security
experts.
Two of the leading ven-
dors, Election Systems
& Software of Omaha,
Nebraska, and Hart Inter-
Civic of Austin, Texas,
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utor to the ElectionGuard
project.
Benaloh helped pro-
duce a National Academies
of Science report last year
that called for an urgent
overhaul of the rickety U.S.
election system, which
faced serious threats from
Russian hackers who in
2016 attempted to infiltrate
voting administration sys-
tems in several states.
That report called for
all U.S. elections to be held
on human-readable paper
ballots by 2020. It also
advocated a specific form
of routine postelection
audits intended to ensure
that votes are accurately
counted. While U.S. offi-
cials say there is no evi-
dence of hackers tamper-
ing with election results,
experts say systems used
by millions of U.S. vot-
ers remain susceptible to
tampering.
One official who has been
in informal conversations
with the ElectionGuard proj-
ect leaders is Dean Logan,
who runs elections for Los
Angeles County, the nation’s
most populous, and is build-
ing an open-source voting
system for it.
Election integrity activ-
ist Susan Greenhalgh of the
National Election Defense
Coalition said she hoped
the project would encour-
age innovative thinking at
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easily hackable — and does
not currently work with
vote-by-mail systems.
ES&S told The Associ-
ated Press via email that it
was excited to partner with
Microsoft and “still explor-
ing the potentials” for
incorporated the software
kit its voting systems.
Hart InterCivic, the No.
3 vendor, said it planned a
pilot project with Micro-
soft to “incorporate Elec-
tionGuard functionality as
an additional feature” lay-
ered over its core platform.
A spokeswoman for
Dominion, the No. 2 ven-
dor, said “We are very
interested in learning more
about the initiative and
being able to review the
various prototypes that are
being planned, along with
hearing more about other
federally-supported efforts
in the elections space.”
Edgardo Cortés, a for-
mer Virginia elections
commissioner now with
New York University’s
Brennan Center, welcomed
additional private sector
support for election systems.
“I think it’ll take a while
to catch on and see how ben-
eficial (ElectionGuard) ends
up being,” he said. “But I
think it certainly does have
a great deal of potential.”
Columbia University will
be partnering with Micro-
soft to audit the pilots.
Teachers across Oregon to walk out
in protests over classroom funding
Associated Press
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the level that elections are
actually managed.
ElectionGuard aims to
provide “end-to-end” ver-
ification of voting in two
ways, Benaloh said. First,
it lets voters confirm that
their votes are accurately
recorded.
Second, the unique
coded tracker it produces
registers an encrypted ver-
sion of the vote that keeps
the ballot choice itself
secret while ensuring votes
are accurately counted.
Outsiders such as election
watchdog groups, politi-
cal parties, journalists and
voters themselves can ver-
ify online that votes were
properly counted without
being altered.
The system would also
allow for reliable postelec-
tion audits and recounts.
Microsoft executives say
they also plan to build a
prototype voting system for
reference.
A spinoff of Galois
called Free & Fair devel-
oped the sophisticated post-
election audits, known as
“risk-limiting,” for Colo-
rado, which was the first
U.S. state to require the
audits recommended in the
National Academies of Sci-
ences report.
ElectionGuard is not
designed to work with
internet voting schemes —
which experts consider too
SALEM — Tens of
thousands of teachers are
expected to walk out across
Oregon this week, adding
to the string of nationwide
protests over class sizes and
education funding.
Schools around the state,
including Oregon’s larg-
est district, Portland Pub-
lic Schools, will close for
at least part of Wednes-
day as educators press for
more money from lawmak-
ers. Some schools will stay
open, as teachers opt for sit-
ins or after-school rallies.
Most schools participating
in the walkout will still have
staff on hand to administer
national Advanced Place-
ment testing or provide food
and care to low-income
students.
Oregon schools have
some of the highest class
sizes and lowest gradu-
ation rates in the United
States. Districts have just
one librarian, or none at
all, fewer than the recom-
mended number of counsel-
ors and been forced to cut
programs like physical edu-
cation and music.
“Our educators have
been trying their hardest
to cover up for our funding
losses and try to do more
with less,” said John Lar-
son, president of the Ore-
gon Education Association.
“We are to a point now that
we can’t do that anymore.
We want to show that Ore-
gon isn’t immune to the
problems we see in other
walkouts throughout the
country.”
The action follows a
wave of teacher activism
that began in West Virginia
in 2018 and was followed by
Oklahoma, Kentucky and
Arizona. Teachers in North
Carolina and South Caro-
lina rallied at their respec-
tive state capitols last week
seeking more money.
But unlike other states,
Oregon teachers want to
make it clear they’re not
pushing for pay raises or
other union demands. They
say they’re walking out to
highlight the conditions
inside the classroom and
how years of lower fund-
ing has affected children’s
learning opportunities.
Washington lawmakers approve
plan to fix the mental health system
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP)
— Washington legislators
took substantial steps to
reshape the mental health
system, including funding
for new facilities, legisla-
tion to increase the number
of qualified workers, and
the creation of new types of
treatment centers.
The Seattle Times reports
that lawmakers approved the
plan — which sprawls across
two different state budgets,
as well as several other bills
— in the legislative session
that ended April 28.
The work comes after
years of court orders and fed-
eral inspections that meticu-
lously documented the poor
treatment of psychiatric
patients in the state’s care,
as well as a steep shortage
of treatment beds and staff-
ers to operate them.
“We’ve never had a
plan before,” said Rep. Joe
Schmick, R-Colfax, part of
a bipartisan group of law-
makers who worked on the
issue. “Always before, it’s
just ‘we’re going to throw
money at something and
we’re going to put out fires.’”
It remains to be seen how
the complex plan comes
together in the coming
years. Grants will have to
be awarded, facilities sited,
permitted and built, and
staff must be found to run
them.
The 2019-21 capital-con-
struction budget spends
roughly $33 million for
pre-design and design of
a new behavioral health
teaching hospital at the Uni-
versity of Washington. The
facility would train mental
health professionals while
also providing as many as
150 treatment beds.
That budget includes
about $118 million toward
building new facilities, or
expanding existing ones,
across the state. Among
other places, it funds proj-
ects in Bremerton, Cen-
tralia, Colville, Edmonds,
Spokane,
Issaquah,
Sedro-Woolley, and for the
Jamestown S’Klallam tribe.
That money also pro-
vides for psychiatric beds
at new or expanded com-
munity hospitals in Everett,
Auburn and Yakima.
Lawmakers
included
some competitive grant
money for projects still to
be determined and funds
to build a 16-bed state-run
facility and a 48-bed facility
that would be partly state-
run. Also, there is $24 mil-
lion in the state Housing
Trust Fund for residential
placements and case man-
agement for people strug-
gling with chronic mental
health issues.
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