The information final week that Dominion Voting Methods was bought by the founder and CEO of Knowink, a Missouri-based maker of digital ballot books, has left election integrity activists confused over what, if something, this might imply for voters and the integrity of US elections.
The corporate, acquired by Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican Get together operative and election director in Missouri earlier than founding Knowink, stated in a press launch that he was rebranding Dominion, which has headquarters in Canada and the US, below the identify Liberty Vote “in a daring and historic transfer to remodel and enhance election integrity in America” and to distance the corporate from false allegations made beforehand by President Donald Trump and his supporters that the corporate had rigged the 2020 presidential election to offer the win to President Joe Biden.
The Liberty launch stated that the rebranded firm can be 100% American owned, that it’s going to have a “paper poll focus” that leverages hand-marked paper ballots, will “prioritize facilitating third-party auditing,” and is “dedicated to home staffing and software program growth.” The press launch offered no particulars, nonetheless, to clarify what this implies in apply.
Dominion, the second main supplier of voting machines within the US, whose techniques are utilized in 27 states—together with the whole state of Georgia—has developed its software program in Belgrade, Serbia and Canada for twenty years. A search on LinkedIn exhibits quite a few programmers and different employees in Serbia who declare to be employed by the corporate.
The Liberty assertion doesn’t say whether or not the corporate plans to re-write code developed by these international employees—which might probably contain rewriting lots of of hundreds of strains of code—or whether or not the corporate will transfer international builders to the US or substitute them with American programmers. (Dominion already has a US headquarters in Colorado.) A Liberty official, who agreed to talk on the situation that they not be named, instructed WIRED solely that Leiendecker “is dedicated to 100% … home staffing and software program growth.” An unnamed supply instructed CNN, nonetheless, that Liberty will continue to have a presence in Canada, the place its machines are used throughout the nation.
Philip Stark, professor of statistics at UC Berkeley and longtime election-integrity advocate, says that Liberty’s assurance about domestic-only employees is a pink herring. “If the declare is that that is in some way a safety measure, it isn’t. As a result of programmers based mostly within the US additionally … could also be curious about undermining or altering election integrity,” he tells WIRED.
With regard to third-party audits talked about within the press launch, a Liberty official instructed WIRED this implies the corporate will conduct a “third-party, top-to-bottom, impartial evaluate of [Dominion] software program and gear in a well timed method and can work carefully with federal and state certification companies and report any vulnerabilities” to offer voters assurance within the machines and the outcomes they produce. The corporate didn’t say when this evaluate would happen, however a Liberty consultant told Axios it might occur forward of subsequent 12 months’s midterm elections, and the corporate would “rebuild or retire” machines as wanted.
