Be part of something bigger

Check your registration and vote November 5th!

We believe that elections should be open and secure. At Microsoft, that means corporate civic responsibility, a healthy information ecosystem, and products that keep elections safe.

Find out from Microsoft employees what we’re doing this Election Day, and every day, to protect and advance democracy.

The future is built together

“Information integrity AND civic engagement are equally important to advance democracy.”

Dave Leichtman
Director of Corporate Civic Responsibility

When employees first banded together in 2019 to organize a company-wide National Voter Registration Day event, they didn’t anticipate they were starting something bigger.

Turning that passion into action, Leichtman and Senior Program Manager LeRoy Laney set to work on building a Microsoft civic engagement hub to answer critical questions. How, when, where to vote, volunteer, donate—and why. Text banking. Phone banking. Letter writing. Canvassing. Working the polls. For their family. For their friends. For their community. The movement grew.

Propelled forward by that momentum and the 2020 elections, Microsoft launched Democracy Forward in 2021. A pledge to safeguard open and secure elections and healthy information systems, corporate civic responsibility was placed at the heart of our commitments. Today, Microsoft also partners with TurboVote to promote voter registration, a key component of open and secure democratic processes.

“One of the things that gets me up in the morning is expanding the right to vote—and one of the things that keeps me up at night is how we’re going to expand the right to vote.”

LeRoy Laney
Senior Program Manager, Employee Giving

Open and secure platforms

“We don’t want to lose sight of why we’re doing this work. We’re defending democracy every day.”

Molly Robinson
Senior Program Manager, Azure CXP

As people head to the polls in 2024, the biggest challenge to secure elections is altogether human. But with the right guardrails in place, bad actors won’t have the chance to act.

“Elections-related work that happens on the Azure platform is just too important to fail,” says Robinson. Her team offers assistance and support for critical cloud workloads. Voter registration. Database management. Ballot counting. All the way to results-reporting.

Running 24/7, Azure helps customers build in resilience to prevent attacks, ideally before they happen. She says, “Azure doesn’t sleep, and then some.”

Keeping information real

“We’re committed to identifying and decreasing any harmful impact of AI on elections through the best tools, resources, and education.”

Whitney Hudson
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Research

“There are more democracies voting this year than ever before, coinciding with the age of AI … and there are more deepfakes than ever before,” points out Hudson. And more than ever before, access to reputable, verified and real content is essential.

“As AI removes technological barriers to production, you have a huge flood of fake content. In time, their impact will be based more on creator expertise,” predicts Robert Osazuwa Ness, Senior Researcher at Microsoft. Adding to the disruption are deeproasts—AI-generated memes that are humorous in a satirical way. “Being fake is what makes them fun, but like parodies, they’re potentially damaging,” says Ness.

The best defense is to authenticate where and when content originates—and how it’s used. Among safeguards are watermarking metadata, “content provenance” (digital literacy), and educational campaigns like “Check. Recheck. Vote.”

“Encouraging companies to adopt standards for the content on their own platforms will also go a long way.”

Robert Ness
Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research