Skip to main content

Microsoft’s ElectionGuard a Trojan Horse for a military-industrial takeover of US elections

“The fact that we are handing over the keys of American democracy to the military-industrial complex — it’s like giving the keys to the henhouse to a fox and saying, ‘here come in and take whatever you want.’ It’s obviously dangerous.” — Investigative journalist Yasha Levine

by Whitney Webb 

Part 2 - Explaining ElectionGuard

According to an announcement made in early May by Tom Burt, Microsoft’s Vice President for Customer Security and Trust, ElectionGuard is “a free open-source software development kit (SDK)” that “will make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it’s used.” Burt’s statement further claims that the ElectionGuard system “will enable end-to-end verification of elections, open results to third-party organizations for secure validation, and allow individual voters to confirm their votes were correctly counted.

While ElectionGuard may appear to concern itself only with electronic ballots, the announcement states that the system “is designed to work with systems that use paper ballots” through the use of an optical scanner.

Notably, Microsoft chose to announce ElectionGuard only after it had already partnered “with major election technology suppliers who are exploring the integration of ElectionGuard into their voting systems.” Burt further noted that Microsoft now has “partnerships with election technology suppliers responsible for more than half of the voting machines sold in the U.S.” ElectionGuard partner companies include Democracy Live, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, BPro, MicroVote, and VotingWorks.

Another interesting, and deeply troubling, admission in the Microsoft announcement is that Microsoft’s ElectionGuard development partner, the Portland-based cybersecurity firm Galois, “recently received $10 million in funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build a demonstration voting system to help evaluate secure hardware DARPA researchers are developing as part of a separate DARPA program.

Microsoft’s announcement then notes that “the agency views ensuring the integrity and security of the election process as a critical national security concern and plans to implement the ElectionGuard SDK as part of their effort to enable an end-to-end verifiable component in future versions of their demonstration voting system.

As deeply troubling as DARPA’s $10 million indirect investment in ElectionGuard may seem, it is merely scratching the surface, as Galois itself is essentially an extension of DARPA in the private cybersecurity industry.

Source, links:


[1] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tech CEOs admit they want AI monopoly: US plans to block China's competition & 'steal' engineers

Geopolitical Economy Report   Big Tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley fear competition from Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek, so they're working with the US government to cut off competitors. Billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel admits they want monopolies, arguing "competition is for losers". Ben Norton explains. 

We asked DeepSeek if China will fully decouple from US dollar - Here is the answer we got in 19 secs

globinfo freexchange     The exact question was: Will China fully decouple from US dollar? The analysis we got in just 19 seconds is pretty impressive:   The question of whether China will "fully decouple" from the U.S. dollar is complex and hinges on geopolitical, economic, and strategic factors. While China has been actively diversifying its financial systems and reducing reliance on the dollar, a complete decoupling in the near term appears unlikely. Here's a balanced analysis: 1. Trends Toward Reduced Dollar Dependence De-dollarization Efforts : China has promoted the use of its currency, the  renminbi (RMB) , in international trade and finance. Initiatives like bilateral currency swaps (e.g., with Russia, Argentina, and others), the  Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) , and the digital yuan (e-CNY) aim to reduce dollar dependency. Commodity Trade : China increasingly settles energy and commodity trades (e.g., with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia) ...

Trump BETRAYS MAGA & “America First” Over Gaza!

The Jimmy Dore Show  

Zuckerberg changes camp in the capitalist civil war, joins the Musk-led oligarchy

globinfo freexchange   It was Mark Zuckerberg this time that decided to change camp in the capitalist civil war, in order to join the Musk-led oligarchy under the oncoming presidency of oligarchy's puppet.   The move by Meta to end its third-party fact-checking program and move to a so-called community notes model, has been justifiably widely interpreted as an attempt by Zuckerberg to ingratiate himself with the incoming Trump administration, which has long denounced the moderation policy as censorship with a left-wing bias.   From the first moments in his interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg attempted to justify his previous policy regarding censorship practices in Facebook, claiming that he was receiving high pressure from the Democratic party to do so! The ex-liberal billionaire oligarch made an impressive 180 degrees turn, claiming that he knew that there was something wrong with the specific policy and that he tried to fight back against the pressure to imple...

In France, Ordinary Consumers Fund Tax Breaks for the Wealthy

Emmanuel Macron’s government gave tax breaks for France’s wealthiest while counting on purchase taxes paid by ordinary consumers. Now saying it has a budget hole to fill, his administration is again expecting working-class people to pick up the bill.   by Marlon Ettinger Part 1 President Emmanuel Macron picked François Bayrou as France’s new prime minister earlier this month, despite his lack of any parliamentary majority. Bayrou’s appointment on December 13 came just over a week after his predecessor Michel Barnier’s government was felled by a no-confidence vote proposed by the Left and joined by the far right, after Barnier tried to force through his budget without having the numbers in the National Assembly.  The most likely outcome now is that Bayrou, who comes from a party called the Democratic Movement, will reimpose last year’s budget by decree. The National Assembly has already assented to continuing last year’s budget by an emergency vote. France’s in many ways undemo...

Hamas Intends to Uphold Agreement, Senior Official Tells Drop Site in 30-Minute Interview

In an exclusive interview with Drop Site News , a senior Hamas official said that the group intends to uphold its side of the “ceasefire” deal—despite claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he received assurances from both President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump that Israel can resume its war against Gaza after the first phase of the agreement. “We are committed to this deal. We will exert the maximum efforts to give this deal a chance to succeed. We are looking for how to prevent the war again, how to protect our people. We will do the best to protect this deal,” said Dr. Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau. “What kind of side deals they have done, this is their business. But what I can say here: the American administration led by Biden, we consider complicit—directly complicit—in the genocide.”   [...]   Naim said that Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, as well as other resistance groups, are prepared to resume fighting if Is...

Raffi Berg: BBC Middle East Editor Exposed as CIA, Mossad Collaborator

A senior BBC editor at the center of an ongoing scandal into the network’s systematic pro-Israel bias is, in fact, a former member of a CIA propaganda outfit, MintPress News can reveal. Raffi Berg, an Englishman who heads the BBC’s Middle East desk, formerly worked for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a unit that, by his own admission, was a CIA front group. Berg is currently the subject of considerable scrutiny after thirteen BBC employees spoke out, claiming, among other things, that his “entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel” and that he holds “wild” amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of “extreme fear” at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into “systematic Israeli propaganda.” The BBC has disputed these claims.   by Alan Macleod    Part 5 - A Worldwide Network   Whatever the v...

A deal delayed, dreams destroyed

The Grayzone   Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate discuss the Gaza ceasefire deal, the real history of US and Israeli obstructionism, and efforts to hold the authors of Gaza's destruction accountable - including Blumenthal's questioning of Tony Blinken at the Secretary of State's final presser.

“Controversial” Singer Iyah May Goes Viral For Lyrics About Vaccines & Gaza!

The Jimmy Dore Show  

Did a Trump executive order just cripple the global US regime change network?

With federal funding paused to USAID, pro-Western media outlets from Ukraine to Nicaragua are panhandling for donations, and a multi-billion dollar regime change apparatus is in panic mode.   Part 1   Among the flurry of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump in the first days of his administration, perhaps the most consequential to date is one titled, “reevaluating and realigning US foreign aid.” Under this order, a 90-day pause was instantly enforced on all US foreign development assistance across the globe – excepting, of course, the largest recipients of US aid in Israel and Egypt. For now, the order forbids the disbursement of federal funding for any “non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors” charged with delivering US “aid” programs overseas.  Within days, hundreds of “internal contractors” at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were placed on unpaid leave or outright fired, as a direct result of the Exe...