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NPR — In an effort to improve confidence in elections, Microsoft announced Monday that it is releasing an open-source software development kit called ElectionGuard that will use encryption techniques to let voters know when their vote is counted. It will also allow election officials and third parties to verify election results to make sure there was no interference with the results. Learn more>>

Motherboard — DARPA and Galois won’t be asking people to blindly trust that their voting systems are secure—as voting machine vendors currently do. Instead they’ll be publishing source code for the software online and bring prototypes of the systems to the Def Con Voting Village this summer and next, so that hackers and researchers will be able to freely examine the systems themselves and conduct penetration tests to gauge their security. They’ll also be working with a number of university teams over the next year to have them examine the systems in formal test environments. Learn more>>

New York Times | The story started, as many do, with our own confusion. The most unusual of presidential elections — one marred by Russian trolls, a digital Watergate-style break-in and the winning candidate’s dire warnings of a “rigged election” — was followed by the most unusual period of acceptance. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, government officials, the Clinton campaign, intelligence analysts, and civic and legal groups all appeared to calmly accept claims that votes had not been hacked.

Scientific American — A raft of start-ups has been hawking what they see as a revolutionary solution: repurposing blockchains, best known as the digital transaction ledgers for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, to record votes. Backers say these internet-based systems would increase voter access to elections while improving tamper-resistance and public auditability. But experts in both cybersecurity and voting see blockchains as needlessly complicated, and no more secure than other online ballots.  Learn more>>

Federal Computer Week — On the day that a special election in Alabama captured national attention, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter urging National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster to take additional steps to secure the nation’s election infrastructure and provide support to state and local governments ahead of next year's mid-term elections. Learn more>>

Free & Fair will be joining The Christian Science Monitor's Passcode division and Wombat Security Technologies during the annual conference & festival that celebrates the convergence of the technology, film, and music industries. Free & Fair team members will be on hand at the CSM-Passcode/Wombat booth from Sunday, March 12 through Tuesday, March 14.

As people and companies seek new ways to conduct elections that make better sense in our high tech world, several startups have proposed using blockchains, or even Bitcoin itself, to conduct elections. Using Bitcoin (or a blockchain) as an election system is a bad idea that really doesn’t make sense. While blockchains can be useful in the election process, they are only appropriate for use in one small part of a larger election system.

The path to provably secure, high assurance, open source election systems capable of protecting elections and providing such certainty may seem daunting. However, the process of achieving that goal can be broken down into a series of useful, common sense steps, each of which positively affects current election systems and processes. We consider these steps in three phases, starting with the most basic and building to fully trustworthy and transparent systems and vendor relations.

The most critical software and hardware systems go beyond evaluation and certification to provide guarantees and mathematical evidence that they will function exactly as intended at all times.

Open Source Software (OSS) is computer software whose source code is made freely available to anyone who wants to use, study, modify, enhance or re-distribute it for any reason. OSS is a fundamentally collaborative concept that seeks to harness the expertise of worldwide developers in order to achieve a polished, correct, and secure product.