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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: 2) by draconx on Monday June 15 2015, @02:23PM
Indeed. Whether a voting computer runs free software or proprietary software does not matter for the voters, because voters are not running the software on their own computer.
If the software is free, then others can make use of the four freedoms to change and modify that software to run on their own computers, and share the software with their friends. But none of that makes any difference at the election. The issues are entirely different.
We must reject voting computers outright, except that using computers to assist with counting paper ballots is acceptable.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @04:45PM
That's simply incorrect. Being able to verify what the machine is doing and what code it's running is very important, because voting affects us all. It doesn't matter if it happens on our own computers or not; software freedom is important in government.
It should simply be illegal for the government to use proprietary software. If existing free software doesn't do the job, it could do the world a favor by creating it and releasing it as free software.