It certainly has nothing to do with democracy, and intended to solve exactly one problem: Microsoft's need to increase revenue through sweet gov't funded contracts. Let's not be fooled by opensourced code, once the idea is sold to politicians, and media, someone should be contracted to implement this useless staff. And who's this going to be? Not hard to guess.
While I appreciate the cynicism, I'm not seeing how an open schema for tamper-evident verifiable voting machines could be anything other than positive.
For starters, the whole voting machines concept is a essentially a ploy to exploit wide-spread respect for computer technologies in society to sell hardware, and software. It reduces observability compared to pieces of paper, and doesn't solve any real problems.
I don't think Gates words from 2004 can be seen as policy statement for today's Msft. Apparently, a lot has changed.
> Microsoft will not charge for using ElectionGuard and will not profit from partnering with election technology suppliers that incorporate it into their products.
I'm not sure how much stronger of a statement they can make than that. There's no money in voting machines for Microsoft.
