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| So sayeth the whut house |
There is a "new kid on the block" wha can deliver the final term to Trump:
"THEN... Of greater concern at the moment, at least to me, is the fact that Liberty Vote, a company that nobody ever heard of before last week --- because, apparently, it did not exist before last week --- has just purchased Dominion Voting, the nation's second largest voting system vendor, which supplies election hardware and software to 27 states. It is also the company that Trump and his supporters falsely claimed had stolen the 2020 election from him.
Liberty's CEO is a guy named Scott Leiendecker who was formerly the Republican Election Director in St. Louis, Missouri. He was hired for that job by the city's Election Commissioner at the time, a guy by the name of Ed Martin. Yeah, That Ed Martin. The far-right Republican activist who is now running Trump's "Weaponization" of the Dept. of Justice. The one who is pulling together the corrupt indictments of Trump foes like James Comey and Letitia James, and overseeing Trump's pardons and commutations for fellow corrupt Republicans like disgraced former Rep. George Santos. Yes, that Ed Martin.
Martin's old pal Leiendecker, after serving as the Republican Election Director in St. Louis, went on to create a company named KNOWiNK, which is now the nation's largest electronic pollbook vendor. He now owns both that company and the nation's second largest voting and tabulation system company. What could possibly go wrong?
There is a whole lot we don't know about the purchase, who is funding it, or what Leiendecker intends to do with the company. Though last week's official announcement of the acquisition (which does not appear to even be published in full on the web, as far as I can tell), begins triumphantly: "As of today, Dominion is gone. Liberty Vote assumes full ownership and operational control." The statement then goes on to emphasize "enabling compliance with President Trump's executive order" regarding voting systems as a top priority, even though that Order has since been blocked by several federal judges for failing to comply with the Constitution.
WIRED's Kim Zetter offers the deepest overall background on the purchase, its players, and the many concerns about it from voting system experts.
Our guest today, longtime election integrity advocate and security expert SUSAN GREENHALGH of Free Speech for People published a piece at Slate this week about the out-of-the-blue acquisition that blind-sided, among others, elections officials (Dominion's customers) across the country who were told nothing about it in advance. In her piece, Greenhalgh argues why, although "the announcement that the second-largest U.S. voting system vendor would be in the hands of a self-declared partisan [has] sparked concerns," the "wildly inappropriate and troubling" development "is merely one aspect of the badly broken, opaque, and corrupted election system industry that we’ve been subjected to for decades."
Greenhalgh joins us to discuss concerns about the Leiendecker/Liberty Vote purchase, the "corrupted election system industry" she mentioned, and how Congress, states, local jurisdictions and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) could take action to mitigate all of this madness and the dwindling confidence Americans have in our elections in the wake of computerized voting systems made by a handful of opaque private companies.
The Dominion website now automatically redirects to Liberty's new, one page site which, for the moment, offers nothing more right now than a letter from Leiendecker focusing on his "promise" for "a 100% American-owned election technology company dedicated to restoring trust in our elections" with, among other things, "American values". The letter vows that the company is "turning the page and beginning the vital work of restoring faith in American elections."
While "faith" is not needed in American elections, public oversight certainly is, in order for Americans to have confidence in their reported election results. Whether Liberty improves on Dominion's record there, remains to be seen. Though lies and insinuations about Dominion --- which won a three-quarters of a billion dollar defamation settlement against Fox "News" after the Republican media outlet repeatedly and knowingly lied about the company --- certainly don't help to restore either "faith" or public oversight and confidence.
Nor does it help that Liberty suggested in its announcement that it would somehow carry out a "top-to-bottom" review of Dominion's hardware and software and would "report any vulnerabilities" it finds. While it's unclear who they would "report" them to, we already know, from last year's trial against the Georgia Sec. of State's mandated use of the company's insecure touchscreen voting systems across the entire state, that there are lots of very serious vulnerabilities in Dominion's systems as well as those made by other companies. But Leiendecker then goes on to vow to somehow replace those systems as needed before the 2026 mid-term elections. As we discuss with Greenhalgh, that is a virtual impossibility, given the time it takes to develop voting systems and have them tested and certified for use by federal and state regulators.
"We need a system that the Devil himself can run," argues Greenhalgh, citing a well-worn phrase among longtime election integrity folks. "The solution is not more transparency with the voting system vendors, just so we know exactly how partisan they are --- although we should know that, we should be entitled to know that --- it should be a system that is so transparent and so auditable --- and that is audited in a trustworthy and public way --- that we can trust the election results at the end of the day, no matter who is running it. That is the solution that we need to be going to."
(The Brad Blog, emphasis added)..
It is a "party" song "if you know what I mean Verne."
The previous post in this series is here.
