The Iowa caucuses are headed to the cloud — but one candidate isn't too happy about it, according to MSNBC.
Microsoft will roll out new apps for each political party to help precincts vet and report their results. But Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' campaign has built its own independent reporting system — one its people said they are "more sure" they can trust.
"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," Pete D'Alessandro, who is running the Iowa portion of Sanders' campaign, told MSNBC. "I'm always going to be more for sure on the stuff that my people had control over the entire time."
The introduction of the new technology has heightened the drama in a contest already considered the first big hurdle for presidential hopefuls.
Microsoft told MSNBC it created the cloud-based platform, run on Azure, "solely to administer and facilitate a neutral, accurate, efficient reporting system for the caucuses." But D'Alessandro questioned "why they'd want to give something like that away for free," in his interview with MSNBC.
Members of the Sanders campaign noted that Microsoft employees have a history of donating to Democratic competitor Hillary Clinton, contributing over $200,000 in her 2008 campaign, according to OpenSecrets.org. But Clinton, too, is preparing a non-Microsoft system, a campaign aide told MSNBC.
Microsoft shares ticked higher Thursday ahead of the company's evening earnings release, on a morning when stocks struggled for gains.