January 2016

The campaign of Sen Bernie Sanders (D-VT) is raising questions about the involvement of Microsoft in the Iowa Caucuses, now just five days away, and has built an independent system to check the official results.

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. 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. It has trained its precinct captain on using the app, which is designed to be as user friendly as possible, and the campaign will also staff a hotline system as further redundancy.

A BuzzFeed News survey of mobile operators around the globe — the companies that actually implement Free Basics — found that in several markets local telecoms largely see Free Basics as a way to give themselves an edge over competitors. While the grand idea might be an initiative to get people online for the first time, these telecoms view and market Free Basics as an alluring offering for digitally savvy but cash-strapped consumers.