“The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is raising questions about the involvement of Microsoft in the Iowa Caucuses, now just days away, and has built a independent system to check the official results,” Alex Seitz-Wald reports for MSNBC. “For the first time this year, Microsoft partnered with the Iowa Democratic and Republican Parties to provide a technology platform with which the parties will run their caucuses. The software giant created separate mobile apps for each party, which officials at hundreds of caucuses across the state will use to report out results from individual precincts to party headquarters for tabulation.”
“The arrangement has aroused the suspicions of aides to Sanders, whose regularly warns that corporate power and the billionaire class are trying to hijack democracy,” Alex Seitz-Wald reports. “Pete D’Alessandro, who is running the Iowa portion of Sanders’ campaign, questioned the motives of the major multinational corporation in an interview with MSNBC: ‘You’d have to ask yourself why they’d want to give something like that away for free.'”
“The Sanders campaign has built their own reporting system to check the results from the official Microsoft-backed app,” Alex Seitz-Wald reports. “Other Sanders aides noted that Microsoft employees have donated several hundred thousand dollars to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton over her career, and questioned why the Iowa Democratic Party didn’t partner with a software company based in Iowa.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Attributing malevolence on Microsoft’s part mistakenly assumes competence.
SEE ALSO:
House Democratic Caucus resort retreat to host Microsoft CEO Ballmer to talk ‘innovation’ – February 4, 2009
Democrats name Microsoft ‘official software and HD Web content provider’ of convention – April 28, 2008
Serious security flaws found in Diebold electronic voting machines – May 15, 2006
Red vs. Blue: Companies ranked by political donations: Apple among bluest, Dell among reddest – October 26, 2006
