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News finally The week that Dominion Voting Systems was purchased by the founder and CEO of Knowink, a Missouri-based maker of e-poll books, left election integrity activists scratching their heads about what, if anything, this might mean for voters and the integrity of American elections.
The company, which has been acquired by Scott Leyendecker, a former GOP activist and elections director in Missouri before founding Newink, said in a press release that it would rebrand Dominion, which is headquartered in Canada and the U.S., as Liberty Vote “in a bold and historic move to transform and improve the integrity of elections in America” and to distance the company from the false claims it had previously made. President Donald Trump and his supporters claim that the company rigged the election. The 2020 presidential election gives victory to President Joe Biden.
Liberty’s statement said the renamed company would be 100% American-owned, would focus on “Paper Ballot,” which leverages hand-marked paper ballots, would “prioritize facilitating third-party auditing,” and be “committed to local hiring and software development.” But the press release did not provide any details to clarify what this means in practice.
Dominion, the second-largest provider of voting machines in the United States, whose systems are used in 27 states — including the entire state of Georgia — has developed its own software In Belgrade, Serbia and Canada for two decades. A search on LinkedIn shows many programmers and other workers in Serbia claiming to be employees of the company.
Liberty’s statement does not say whether the company plans to rewrite code developed by these foreign workers — which could involve rewriting hundreds of thousands of lines of code — or whether the company will move foreign developers to the United States or replace them with American programmers. (Dominion already has a U.S. headquarters in Colorado.) A Liberty official, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, told WIRED only that Leyendecker is “100 percent committed…to local hiring and software development.” But an unnamed source told CNN that Liberty would do so Continue to be present In Canada, where its devices are used throughout the country.
Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a longtime advocate for election integrity, says Liberty’s assertions about domestic workers only are just a pretext. “If the claim is that this is somehow a security measure, it’s not. Because US-based programmers also…may be interested in undermining or altering the integrity of the election,” he told WIRED.
Regarding the third-party audits mentioned in the press release, a Liberty official told WIRED that this means the company will conduct “an independent, top-to-bottom, third-party review of (Dominion’s) software and equipment in a timely manner and will work closely with federal and state certification and reporting agencies for any vulnerabilities” to give voters assurances about the hardware and results that Produce it. The company did not say when this review would take place, but a Liberty representative said Axios said That will happen before next year’s midterm elections, and the company will “rebuild or retire” the machines as needed.