A Republican now controls a huge part of the US election infrastructure

The latest news The week since Dominion Voting Systems was acquired by the founder and CEO of Knowink, a Missouri-based maker of e-poll books, has election integrity activists confused about what it could mean for voters and the integrity of US elections.

The company, which was acquired by Scott Lindecker, a former GOP operative and director of elections in Missouri before founding Knowink, said in a press release that it is rebranding Dominion, headquartered in Canada and the United States, as Liberty Vote “in a bold and historic move to transform and improve the integrity of elections in America” ​​and to distance the president from the previous company and the president’s company from the company. It is false. He rigged the 2020 presidential election to win for President Joe Biden.

Liberty’s statement said the rebranded company will be 100 percent American-owned, will “focus on paper ballots,” use hand-marked paper ballots, “prioritize third-party audit facilitation” and “commit to internal staff and software development.” However, the press release did not provide details to explain what this means in practice.

Dominion, the second-leading provider of voting machines in the United States, 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 reveals a large number of programmers and other workers in Serbia who claim to be employed by the company.

Liberty’s statement did not say whether the company plans to rewrite the code developed by these foreign workers — potentially requiring hundreds of thousands of lines of code to be rewritten — or whether the company will move the foreign developers to the United States or replace them with American programmers. (Dominion has a US headquarters in Colorado.) A Liberty official, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, told WIRED only that Leiendecker is “100 percent committed to … internal staffing and software development.” However, an unnamed source told CNN that Liberty will continue to have a presence in Canada, where its cars are used across the country.

Philip Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a longtime advocate for election integrity, says Liberty’s guarantee of work-at-home workers is a red herring. “If it’s claimed to be 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-down, third-party review. [Dominion] The software and equipment will “work closely with federal and state certification agencies in a timely manner and report any vulnerabilities” to give voters confidence about the machines and the results they produce. The company did not say when the review would take place, but a Liberty representative told Axios that it would happen before next year’s midterm elections, and the company would retire.