Sanders Concerned About Microsoft Hacking Iowa Vote

January 29th, 2016

Awake Goy

The Iowa Caucuses are coming up on Monday, and for the first time, smartphones will play a role in calculating who wins. But it’s not a government app that party leaders will be using to file totals, it’s a Microsoft product. And that has at least one candidate concerned.

In an interview with MSNBC, Bernie Sanders’ Iowa campaign manager Pete D’Alessandro was suspicious of a large corporation’s intentions in helping total the vote. “You’d have to ask yourself why they’d want to give something like that away for free,” he told the news channel.

And Sanders’ team has built its own, separate reporting system to double-check the results. The campaign is also using a dial-in system to provide even further redundancy in keeping Microsoft’s system honest.

“It’s just a way that our folks can have an app that we trust to get the numbers to us in a timely fashion,” D’Alessandro told MSNBC. “I’m always going to be more for sure on the stuff that my people had control over the entire time… If there are any problems, we can spot them right away.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is also using a secondary counting system to double-check totals, but hasn’t publicly stated skepticism about Microsoft’s involvement.

“The Iowa Caucuses provided a unique, non-partisan opportunity to use technology to help evolve the reporting process,” a Microsoft representative said in a statement. “Microsoft is providing technology and services solely to administer and facilitate a neutral, accurate, efficient reporting system for the caucuses. We are proud to partner with the Iowa Democratic and Republican parties to ensure accurate results on caucus night.”