"The partnership makes Hart the first major voting machine manufacturer in the United States to provide end-to-end verifiability to voters, giving individual voters the ability to confirm their ballots were counted in an election and not altered", the companies said in a joint press release.
End-to-end verifiability provided by the Microsoft-developed software will also enable election officials to independently confirm the accuracy of the overall vote count, the release said.
Hart, whose Verity voting system is currently used by more than 500 jurisdictions in 17 US states, will launch a series of pilot tests in which voters will fill out paper ballots with a Verity marking device and given a verification code.
Once the election is complete, voters can check their verification code on a web portal to confirm their ballot was counted in the final election results, with encryption keeping people’s votes secret.
Concerns over vote-count accuracy clouded recent US elections, with former President Donald Trump continuing to insist he won the 2020 election but his victory was stolen due to massive election and voter fraud.
