This repository is a "reference implementation" of ElectionGuard written in Python 3. This implementation can be used to conduct End-to-End Verifiable Elections as well as privacy-enhanced risk-limiting audits. Components of this library can also be used to construct "Verifiers" to validate the results of an ElectionGuard election.
| File/folder | Description |
|---|---|
| docs | Documentation for using the library. |
| src/electionguard | ElectionGuard library. |
| src/electionguard_tools | Tools for testing and sample data. |
| src/electionguard_verifier | Verifier to validate the validity of a ballot. |
| stubs | Type annotations for external libraries. |
| tests | Tests to exercise this codebase. |
| CONTRIBUTING.md | Guidelines for contributing. |
| README.md | This README file. |
| LICENSE | The license for ElectionGuard-Python. |
| data | Sample election data. |
ElectionGuard is an open source software development kit (SDK) that makes voting more secure, transparent and accessible. The ElectionGuard SDK leverages homomorphic encryption to ensure that votes recorded by electronic systems of any type remain encrypted, secure, and secret. Meanwhile, ElectionGuard also allows verifiable and accurate tallying of ballots by any 3rd party organization without compromising secrecy or security.
Learn More in the ElectionGuard Repository
ElectionGuard supports a variety of use cases. The Primary use case is to generate verifiable end-to-end (E2E) encrypted elections. The ElectionGuard process can also be used for other use cases such as privacy enhanced risk-limiting audits (RLAs).
- Python 3.9+ is required to develop this SDK. If developer uses multiple versions of python, pyenv is suggested to assist version management.
- GNU Make is used to simplify the commands and GitHub Actions. This approach is recommended to simplify the command line experience. This is built in for MacOS and Linux. For Windows, setup is simpler with Chocolatey and installing the provided make package. The other Windows option is manually installing make.
- Gmpy2 is used for Arbitrary-precision arithmetic which
has its own installation requirements (native C libraries) on Linux and MacOS.
⚠️ Note: This is not required for Windows since the gmpy2 precompiled libraries are provided. - poetry 1.1.13 is used to configure the python environment. Installation instructions can be found here.
Using make, the entire GitHub Action workflow can be run with one command:
make
The unit and integration tests can also be run with make:
make test
A complete end-to-end election example can be run independently by executing:
make test-example
For more detailed build and run options, see the documentation.
Overviews:
Sections:
Step-by-Step Process:
This project encourages community contributions for development, testing, documentation, code review, and performance analysis, etc. For more information on how to contribute, see the contribution guidelines
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.
Please report any bugs, feature requests, or enhancements using the GitHub Issue Tracker. Please do not report any security vulnerabilities using the Issue Tracker. Instead, please report them to the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) at https://msrc.microsoft.com/create-report. See the Security Documentation for more information.
Electionguard would love for you to ask questions out in the open using GitHub Issues. If you really want to email the ElectionGuard team, reach out at electionguard@microsoft.com.
This repository is licensed under the MIT License
A huge thank you to those who helped to contribute to this project so far, including:
Keith Fung (InfernoRed Technology)
Matt Wilhelm (InfernoRed Technology)
Dan S. Wallach (Rice University)
