After initially focusing on the surprisingly lopsided results of the senatorial election in Kentucky, DCReport broadened our scope to look at the electronic vote-counting software and electronic voting systems that we rely on to tally our votes. This prompted us to raise questions about Electronic Systems & Software (ES&S), America’s largest voting machine company. What we found was a revolving door between government officials and ES&S. […]
- Owned by a private equity firm, ES&S has been elusive about identifying the people in its ownership.
- A number of ES&S executives and lobbyists have ties to top GOP election officials and politicians.
- The ES&S executive in charge of the security previously worked in the Trump administration as a government executive at Health and Human Services before leaving under a cloud.
- Forty of the 50 states use ES&S to cast and count some of their votes.
- Of the 25 states Trump won, all but 3 either partially or fully relied on ES&S machines. The states where Trump won that didn’t use ES&S machines were Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alaska. […]
Our democracy now relies on private companies, which build proprietary electronic systems, to reliably count our votes. It seems reasonable, if not crucial, to understand who is behind these companies as a standard to ensure election integrity. Without such knowledge we run the risk that zealots, investors with financial stakes in who wins elections or those susceptible to bribery have an incentive to use subtle software programming techniques to deliberately miscount votes to guarantee an outcome. In close elections, software code that invalidates or miscounts a mere sliver of ballots can change the outcome. […]
