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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 Thexalon on Tuesday June 16 2015, @04:51PM
In my home state in 2004, I took strong notice of the fact that it took me approximately 20 minutes to vote in the mostly white genteel suburb, while a coworker of mine from a not-at-all-genteel urban precinct spent 2.5 hours waiting in line. And apparently it got worse in the not-at-all-genteel district as time went on. By complete coincidence, the secretary of state who controlled little details like how many voting machines were in which precincts just happened to be the state campaign manager for the Republican candidate for president. And the not-at-all-genteel urban precinct was chock full of die-hard Democrats.
Another technique seen more recently: The secretary of state has the tie-breaking vote on all of the county-wide elections councils (which are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans) that determine when early voting is open. Ours was voting for extended hours in areas which tended to support his party, and really short hours in areas which tended to oppose his party, until a federal court ruled he couldn't do that.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.