One Republican Now Controls a Huge Chunk of US Election Infrastructure

The news is over In the week that the founder and CEO of Knowink, a Missouri-based maker of electronic poll books, bought Dominion Voting Systems, election integrity activists are confused about what, if anything, this could mean for voters and the integrity of US elections.

The company, which was acquired by Scott Liendecker, a former Republican Party operative and elections director in Missouri before founding Nowink, said in a press release that it is “headquartered in Canada and the United States in a bold and historic move to transform and improve the Liberty Vote” and its previous electoral integrity by Donald Trump and all of its electoral integrity from America. distance was created. Supporters of the company that rigged the 2020 presidential election to win President Joe Biden.

The Liberty release said the rebranded company would be 100 percent American-owned, have a “paper ballot focus” that would employ hand-marked paper ballots, “prioritize the facilitation of third-party auditing” and be “committed to in-house staffing and software development.” The press release did not provide any details to explain what this means in practice.

Dominion, the second-leading supplier of voting machines in the US, whose systems are used in 27 states – including the entire state of Georgia – developed its software in Canada and Belgrade, Serbia, For two decades. A search on LinkedIn shows numerous programmers and other workers from Serbia who claim to be employed by the company.

The Liberty statement did not say whether the company plans to rewrite code created by these foreign workers—which would potentially involve rewriting thousands of lines of code—or whether the company would move foreign developers to the United States or replace them with American programmers. (Dominion has a U.S. headquarters in Colorado.) A Liberty official, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, told Wired only that Liendecker is “100 percent … committed to domestic staffing and software development.” Liberty will, a source told CNN on condition of anonymity Continue to have a presence in Canada, where its machines are used across the country.

Philip Stark, a UC Berkeley statistics professor and longtime election-integrity advocate, said Liberty’s assurance about domestic workers only is a red herring. “If the claim is that this is somehow a security measure, it’s not. Because even programmers based in the United States … may be interested in reducing or altering the integrity of elections,” he told Wired.

Regarding the third-party audit mentioned in the press release, a Liberty official told WIRED it means the company will conduct a “third-party, top-to-bottom, independent review. [Dominion] The software and equipment will work closely with federal and state certification agencies in a timely manner and report any vulnerabilities to assure voters of the machines and the results they produce. told Axios That will happen before next year’s midterm elections, and the company will “rebuild or retire” the machines as needed.