Protecting Our Elections with Emerging Tech

In this episode, I'm excited to be speaking with Dr. Josh Benaloh, Senior Principal Cryptographer at Microsoft Research. If you have ever wondered why we still don’t hold our elections online, how we can combat interference in our elections, or how advanced cryptography can be used to create an end-to-end verifiable election systems, this is the episode for you! Josh walks us through why Microsoft has been working with governments, NGOs, academics and industry on the Defending Democracy Program. Within this program Josh focuses on  ElectionGuard, a Microsoft developed, open source SDK that uses encryption to dramatically improve election integrity today and perhaps move us toward wide-scale online voting in the future. We’ll also explore the fascinating history of elections, the trade-offs among privacy, and why blockchain may not be the best fit for election systems.