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Roy Schestowitz at TechRights reports:
Microsoft wages war on politics in all sorts of ways, sometimes through lobbyists, sometimes through 'former' staff, pseudo 'charities' like the Gates Foundation, and pressure groups like the Business Software Alliance.
Today we present information given to us courtesy of the California Association of Voting Officials. They complain about Microsoft lobbyists and they have expressed an interest in aligning for global issues, for they too realise that Microsoft cannot be ignored if society wants fair elections and ultimately pursues voting machinery that can be trusted.
Microsoft lobbying in this area is a scarcely explored topic. There is very little information about it out there, hence we hardly ever covered the topic. It is widely known, however, that voting machines in the US use Windows, which has back doors and therefore can never be trusted, with or without tampering by a human operator.
[...]Somehow, despite public will to induce transparency, accountability, audits, etc. on the process, decades later we are still [...] heavily dependent on a proprietary, secretive system (or set thereof).
[...]"We put open source language into voting system legislation", told us [sic] someone from the California Association of Voting Officials, "and the Microsoft lobbyists have it removed.
"This must be stopped as OS voting systems are a preferred security environment for vote tabulation... the alternative being Diebold / Dominion / Microsoft, etc."[...]
The head attorneys for President Obama's election report (which omitted open source voting system solutions even though the information was gifted to them) work for firms that lobby and/or represent Microsoft (Bob Bauer of Perkins Coie and Ben Ginsburg of Pattons Boggs/Jones Day)
Nate Persily was tasked with presenting the President with all information...but inexplicably failed to include any reference to open source in the report. When asked about this omission--and possible steps to remedy (addendum etc)--Persily went silent.
No members of the Presidential Committee were responsive...
In California--which is the frontline of the battle for open source voting systems in the USA--the lobbyist for the California Association of Clerks and Elected Officials Barry Brokaw is also the lobbyist for Microsoft
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @12:50PM
It's entirely the greedy corporations fault, cos the corrupt government officials responsible for awarding the contract to Microsoft had no choice... they were forced to take the bribes and favors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @01:39PM
It's the fault of both, of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @02:14AM
You're right that for the most part the government officials had no choice. The decision to privatize comes from the top. Its the legislators' fault for removing the power from the hands of the people and placing it in the hands of corporations; its also the fault of the idiot public for cheering on their representatives as they lose more and more of the authority, checks & balances, and transparency they once had over their delegates.