The news last week that Dominion Voting Systems was purchased by the founder and CEO of Knowink, a Missouri-based maker of electronic poll books, has left election integrity activists confused over what, if anything, this could mean for voters and the integrity of US elections.
The company, acquired by Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican Party operative and election director in Missouri before founding Knowink, said in a press release that he was rebranding Dominion, which has headquarters in Canada and the United States, under the name Liberty Vote “in a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America” and to distance the company from false allegations made previously by President Donald Trump and his supporters that the company had rigged the 2020 presidential election to give the win to President Joe Biden.
The Liberty release said that the rebranded company will be 100 percent American-owned, that it will have a “paper ballot focus” that leverages hand-marked paper ballots, will “prioritize facilitating third-party auditing,” and is “committed to domestic staffing and software development.” The press release provided no details, however, to explain what this means in practice.
Dominion, the second leading provider of voting machines in the US, whose systems are used in 27 states—including the entire state of Georgia—has developed its software in Canada and Belgrade, Serbia, for two decades. A search on LinkedIn shows numerous programmers and other workers in Serbia who claim to be employed by the company.
The Liberty statement does not say whether the company plans to rewrite code developed by these foreign workers—which would potentially involve rewriting hundreds of thousands of lines of code—or whether the company will move foreign developers to the US or replace them with American programmers. (Dominion has a US headquarters in Colorado.) A Liberty official, who agreed to speak on the condition that they not be named, told WIRED only that Leiendecker “is committed to 100 percent … domestic staffing and software development.” An unnamed source told CNN, however, that Liberty will continue to have a presence in Canada, where its machines are used across the country.
Philip Stark, professor of statistics at UC Berkeley and a longtime election-integrity advocate, says Liberty’s assurance about domestic-only workers is a red herring. “If the claim is that this is somehow a security measure, it isn’t. Because programmers based in the US also … may be interested in undermining or altering election integrity,” he tells WIRED.
With regard to third-party audits mentioned in the press release, a Liberty official told WIRED this means the company will conduct a “third-party, top-to-bottom, independent review of [Dominion] software and equipment in a timely manner and will work closely with federal and state certification agencies and report any vulnerabilities” to give voters assurance in the machines and the results they produce. The company didn’t say when this review would occur, but a Liberty representative told Axios it would happen ahead of next year’s midterm elections, and the company would “rebuild or retire” machines as needed.
