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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 Phoenix666 on Monday June 15 2015, @05:50PM
There is no multi-million dollar contract in paper ballots for anyone. There is for electronic voting.
Really, though, electronic voting makes formal what most American voters have suspected for a long time, that voting for change is a scam, and that voting only exists to fabricate the illusion of consent. With electronic voting, there remains no way for citizens to challenge the assumption of the legitimacy of the vote. There's no way to verify the ballot trail, there are no recounts.
There's also the second dimension, that of the Citizens United decision, which redoubles the illegitimacy of voting in America. Layer that on top of the sham of electronic voting and you have more grievance than the Founding Fathers ever had to form the United States of America in the first place.
Citizens can either choose to swallow the lie of voting wholesale, knowingly, or they can rouse themselves to the difficult but necessary task of rebooting the entire political system.
Washington DC delenda est.