MITRE ElectionGuard Verifier

John D. Ramsdell and Moses D. Liskov

ElectionGuard is a software system designed to make voting more secure, transparent and accessible. ElectionGuard uses cryptography to ensure that

• voters can verify that their own selections have been correctly recorded, and

• anyone can verify that the recorded votes have been correctly tallied.

The MITRE ElectionGuard Verifier provides the means to validate ElectionGuard election records in an easy to use package. It is written in the Julia programming language. Follow the instructions at the Julia web site to download and install the system on your computer. The user instructions are at ElectionGuardVerifier.jl.

Developer Instructions

To develop the code locally, one must install the JSON package. From the Julia REPL, type ] to enter the Pkg REPL mode and run

pkg> add JSON.jl

Type the delete key or cntl-C to exit the Pkg REPL mode.

Documentation

View developer documentation here.

Modifying Code

To develop code, a useful pattern is to create the er directory in the directory containing this README, and place sample data within it.

1. Start Julia with the command

   $ julia --project=.

   Unix OS users should look at the ju script.

2. Load the software with

   julia> using ElectionGuardVerifier

3. Load your election records with

   julia> er = load("er");

4. Check your election records with

   julia> check(er)

   The final line of output is true if your election records pass all tests, otherwise it is false.

5. Exit Julia with exit() or type cntl-D.

Script

For Unix-based operating systems, create a MITRE ElectionGuard Verifier script with

$ julia src/Make_script.jl > verifier
$ chmod +x verifier

Debugging

For debugging 1.0.0-preview-1 data, I place sample data at ../electionguard/data/1.0.0-preview-1/sample, start julia with julia --project=. (see the ju script), replace steps 2-3 with include("src/Run.jl"), and then load the data with er=load(path);.

For Windows, be sure to replace forward slash with backslash in path names.

Visual Studio Code

VS Code has a good extension for Julia. When the extension is installed, the following ensures that VS Code finds the correct Julia project.

$ code .