Half of America's Voting Machines Are Now Owned by a MAGA Oligarch
121 comments
·October 14, 2025Ancapistani
twisteriffic
> The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
Yeah that's a nice thought, but it ignores a whole lot of recent evidence to the contrary.
Ancapistani
Half the country feels the way you do. The other half felt that way for the past four years.
If centralized ownership is an issue, we should all work together to fix that. If the issue is the party affiliation, then it isn't an issue at all.
colonCapitalDee
Half the country is wrong. I agree that centralized ownership is a problem regardless of party, but putting on both sides blinders is not the answer.
zeven7
Did Dominion have a party affiliation? I would assume we just went from neutral party affiliation to strong party affiliation, not from one party to another.
Spooky23
That’s two reductive and poor arguments. Both sides fallacy doesn’t fly in 2025.
Voting machine anxiety for lack of a better term has been a presence for some time and isn’t a partisan issue. What is a partisan issue is President Trump’s baseless allegations re the election he hasn’t acknowledged losing in 2020.
Party affiliation is absolutely an issue with respect to Marvel villain parody that the modern Republican Party has become. I can’t read the article because Substack, but if the new owner is in fact a MAGA guy, (and this isn’t just drama) that’s a big problem.
jibal
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NoMoreNicksLeft
If only the other party owned intolerable influence over the machinery that counts the votes, we'd be safe!
beej71
If only a neutral party had that influence.
jaredklewis
> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.
Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.
aredox
>The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
Only one party tried to overturn an election, repeatedly refused to acknowledge they could lose and respect the result of the election, and is propped up by anti-democracy billionaires.
Ancapistani
Respectfully, I don't believe that to be true.
Hillary Clinton refused to concede on election night. Al Gore didn't concede in 2000 until over a month afterward. Gore initially conceded, retracted it, demanded multiple recounts and fought his loss in the courts all the way to SCOTUS.
Both parties have many billionaire donors - the Democrats are at about 10% of all donations, the GOP at about 30%.
As I've said elsewhere in this discussion, the only thing that I see that has changed with Trump is that his administration is doing openly what has traditionally been hidden from the public.
ubiquitysc
Oh man I forgot when Clinton and Gore egged on a mob in an attempted coup as well
atmavatar
Hillary Clinton refused to concede on election night.
See: https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/cal...
See: https://apnews.com/article/fb2e92a47f054019a2589ace78d20836
Based on the former link, Hillary gave her concession call to Trump at 2:50 AM EST.
She gave her public concession speech several hours later.
See: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/clinton-concedes-to-t...
I'm rather curious what more you expected.
In Gore's case, we had a razor thin electoral result that hinged on a single state with less than a 550 vote margin against 5.96 million votes cast, or 0.009%. We can argue about how many recounts there should have been, but it makes perfect sense there'd be some contention when the entire election came down to so few votes.
To his credit, he conceded the day after the Supreme Court made their ruling, exhausting his final legal recourse.
See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/dec/14/uselections200...
You may notice a distinct absence of attacks on the US capitol during the certification of either the 2000 or 2016 elections. You'll also do well to note that Bill Clinton in 2000 and Obama in 2016 dutifully aided their Republican successors getting up to speed with their office on the way in, sharply contrasting Trump's treatment of Biden's incoming administration.
And, to this day, Trump still hasn't publicly conceded his 2020 loss. Quite the opposite - on multiple occasions, he's voiced the opinion that he should be allowed to run again in 2028 to make up for his "stolen" second term.
There are still plenty of Republican members of Congress as well as many state-level Republicans who maintain the 2020 election was stolen.
You would have a hard time finding a single elected Democrat at either the federal or state level who would claim any presidential elections were stolen from their party's candidates.
There is no good faith argument to be made that both parties are the same in this regard.
aredox
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Ancapistani
Helplessness? Not at all. I'd be very much in favor of changing the way our elections are run, in many ways.
Pointing out that one person that you don't like is in a position of power isn't the same thing.
I think this quote by Thomas Paine illustrates my position:
> [...] so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.
There's a reason the US Constitution prohibits bills of attainder. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, applied equally to all. The way to fix this is via legislation that codifies the system we want to have.
skinnymuch
Didn’t America not have laws equal at all for a long time based on the Constitution and only recently it is superficially equal to all (we all know the law doesn’t work the same for everyone)?
boringg
>> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
Thanks for the finger wagging - great motivation there. I mean if you live in a country where these things are actual serious problems, you're no longer living in a democracy. I have doubts that ownership of the voting machine company is truly a problem - though it certainly doesn't look great.
efitz
Two thoughts:
1. It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
2. Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”. Ok fine, then no one should have a problem with whoever owns the voting machines, because there’s so little risk, only crazy people would even ask for investigation.
Which is it?
Ofc there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US. And ofc it was a problem in 2020 as well. The solution is to get easy-to-tamper-but-hard-to-detect stuff out of the voting process. Pen and paper and video recorded hand counts in front of witnesses. Same night results. It is not rocket science and most of the rest of the world does it this way.
ekr____
The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly. Specifically, the cost of hand counting is the product of the number of ballots times the number of contests on each ballot. US elections tend to have a very large number of contests, which makes the counting very slow. [0] Even with the California 1% manual tally this can take weeks [1] It's true that most of the world does hand counting, but most of the world has one or two contests. It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot, which obviously takes 20x as long.
A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.
The following blog series on why voting is hard goes into this in more detail: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting1/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-opscan/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-vbm/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-dre/
[0] https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/#scalability
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/...
zahlman
> It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot
This is the problem. Voters shouldn't be expected to work on 20+ decisions simultaneously during the campaign season. Canada certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of any countries aside from the US that do.
cogman10
This is what my state does. It works great.
cogman10
> It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.
I disagree. My state uses paper ballots and scantrons which I think is exactly the right mix of machine in the process. A hand recount can be pulled off pretty easily (Which, IMO, you probably want some sort of machine involved there too to hold the tally. Even if it's just a txt file).
What's crazy is the extreme side of the machine in the process, where the machine is opaquely keeping track of who voted how.
clickety_clack
If votes are counted by hand, you have to systematically corrupt hundreds, maybe thousands of people across jurisdictions. With machines you only have to corrupt a single person.
aredox
>Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”.
What you handwave as "the unanimous response" has in reality been dozen of trials, where the people pretending there has been election fraud weren't able to offer any proof, and some were even held in contempt for refusing to substantiate their baseless claims in front of a judge.
walkabout
And, notably, Republicans have been making claims of widespread voter fraud in favor of Democrats since well before Trump, have gotten into state office in part on a message of cracking down on it, followed up with investigations, and come up with... nothing. A handful of "whoopsie" mistakes (still prosecutable, sure, but probably not done on purpose) and the odd one or two actual attempts at individual fraud, with no strong partisan slant. No conspiracy, no rampant fraud at all.
Where's Trump's investigation of this? Any of the Republican governors in the states he or his proxies allege widespread fraud? That should have been a top priority! They're not aggressively pursuing it because there's nothing there, and they know it. Anyone looking critically at their behavior over the couple decades, at least, that they've been alleging organized Democratic voter fraud can tell they don't believe their own allegations, because they don't act like they do when it comes time to put up or shut up.
lokar
IMO the answer has always been:
- vote marking machines (eg it marks a voter readable ballot that is the official record). You get fast preliminary results and improved voter accessibility but still have very high tamper resistance.
- risk limiting audits in all jurisdictions
bryanlarsen
My jurisdiction in Canada uses an OCR machine on a paper ballot. The paper ballot is the official record and recounts are done by hand. Seems to be the obvious way to do things.
Waterluvian
It can vary but it’s usually even lower tech. Federal elections are all counted by hand and do not use OCR. I’m not actually sure most provinces use OCR either. It would be the exception, if it’s used at all. When I worked at Elections Ontario it was not OCR.
I think the main thing is that we have one federal, one provincial, and one municipal election per 4ish years (give or take…). And these are generally voting for one race.
American elections can have dozens of different races/questions. This causes them to depend on technology to count, as a full hand count is too impractical for that many different votes.
whimsicalism
pretty sure this is how it is typically done in the US and pretty sure Canada even uses these same machines mostly
philistine
Canada does not use those machines. I challenge you to find a Canadian election that used machines of any kind.
echelon
Some states are really behind.
Several states use Scantron, and a few jurisdictions (IIRC) still use punch ballot.
The state of Georgia uses these modern "digitally select, then print a ballot with QR code and legible names" ballots. They're great and feel optimal.
rwmj
Just use paper, that's the answer. It works fine. There is simply no need at all for a machine to be involved.
> You get fast preliminary results
A non-problem. Exit polls can do this if you really need it.
whimsicalism
i think 2020 election proved there are strong legitimacy reasons to prefer a quick count that is almost certainly correct with subsequent paper verification
beeflet
what reasons
echelon
The best systems are hybrid electronic + paper.
A machine prints your ballot with your choices in large, human-readable font. You can read it before you drop it in the submission box.
A QR code on the same page digitally encodes your choices.
You can get near-immediate results after the election, and everything can be perfectly audited and accounted for.
cogman10
In idaho we have a paper ballot and scantrons (effectively).
Simple, cheap, fast, and easy to audit.
I don't really see why this isn't the standard beyond very dense populations needing bigger election offices or ideally extended early voting.
echelon
Scantrons are subject to voter error, confusion, mis-labeling. They're almost as bad as punch-ballot.
The state of Georgia finally has the perfect voting machine setup after many years of "hackable" digital-only voting machines:
- Voters are given a signed, electronic card to make choices at a voting booth (same as before, in the suspicious "hackable" era).
- As of 2020, after you make your elections, you receive a full-page paper printout which records your choices on A4-sized paper. This is your ballot. The names of your choices are clearly visible so you can physically review all of your votes in a large, easy to read font. All of it is crisply printed with no "hanging chads", misprinting, or under-inked results. There's only one page.
- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.
- You scan and deposit your paper ballot and card together in a secure lock box that cannot be opened without key.
This system feels perfect.
cogman10
> Scantrons are subject to voter error, confusion, mis-labeling.
There's no way to design a voting system that won't confuse some percentage of the population.
But when I said "scantron" it's not an actual scantron. The ballots look like this [1]
I don't really see how you could make that easier to fill out.
EDIT: Gah, they make it hard to create these links.
Click on district "1921" to see a sample ballot.
gruez
>- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.
How do you ensure secret ballots when it's printing an opaque identifier (the QR code) on your ballot?
fabian2k
Plain paper ballots work very well in other countries. That would probably need more adjustments in organization though in the US. And we still get fast preliminary results at 6pm the same day.
whimsicalism
- a national id that is easy for any US citizen to acquire (and a separate, similar id for all legal residents)
ezfe
drive by opinions aren't really helpful, we're talking about the technical voting machines, not election policy
whimsicalism
I think it is obviously on topic for this article specifically highlighting this problem and doubt I'm being downvoted due to some neutral criterion separating 'machine' from 'policy'.
> See, the SAVE Act got a lot of attention in the media because it will take away eligible Americans’ ability to vote because it requires in-person registration with specific documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or State ID + birth certificate) that millions of citizens lack. State ID alone is not enough. 47 states don’t print “U.S. citizen” anywhere on them.
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musha68k
Aside from cryptographically sound and open source end to end verifiable options there is one simple alternative still used in many other countries and jurisdictions:
1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly
Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
gruez
That won't stop the election cranks. In the 2020 election there were accusations of election fraud centered around workers "stuffing" ballot boxes or otherwise acting suspiciously.
CGMthrowaway
How did a man/company with annual revenue <$20M/year obtain the capital necessary to purchase a company that has $787M in receivables from the Fox News settlement?
There are some key details missing in this story.
nullorempty
I'd think the feds or individual states should own the machines...
wahern
I think it's sloppy wording and rhetoric by the article author. AFAIU most jurisdictions do purchase and own their machines, as opposed to leasing.
consumer451
But we live in the age where it's normal to buy something, and yet not really own it.
The most egregious example has to be the F-35.
Does the local gov "buying" a voting machine give them total visibility into the software? I am genuinely curious.
mystraline
I had some friends who worked in CISA. Had, cause they were fired, RIF'd, early retirement, etc. They have been gutted.
During the Biden campaign, there were a few people doing rudimentary data gathering and election machine investigations. After they announced to their bosses, order came from the top to cease all voting machine research and destroy what they did.
We dont know why the order to cease and destroy was issued. But, yeah. A guess was that the existing players bribe both parties, and bribe was called in.
If you want to snoop more, go look at what Defcon's Election village is doing. Quite a few of those findings were damning.
OrvalWintermute
voting machine security was such a joke as shown by many, and J. Alex Halderman most recently
Ancapistani
The ones in my precinct had exposed USB ports accessible to the voter while behind the privacy curtain. There was a lockable door to cover them, but they were left open.
When I pointed it out I was told that it was policy and they couldn't lock them. They didn't even have a key.
izzydata
Once the company sells the voting machine to some state or city I would assume the voting machine is not "owned" by the company anymore. I'm also assuming they aren't in any way connected to a network and are all isolated independent systems.
The state should be auditing them prior to using them to see that they work as expected.
whimsicalism
I don't really think this is that much of a problem, but perhaps we should have a bit more diversity in voting machines.
fghorow
Joseph Stalin said some version of "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."
(Mixed rating, according to Snopes.)
andreygrehov
'I care not who casts the votes of a nation, provided I can count them,' Napoleon failed to remark." — New York Times editorial (26 May 1880) [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1880/05/26/archives/imperialism.html
DavidWoof
Snopes has this as mixed because Stalin may or may not have expressed this sentiment at some point, but it seems impossibly unlikely to me that this pun works in Russian as it does in English.
hotep99
The hand-wringing in this article about Republicans signing up election monitors and having lawyers on stand-by is absurd. Both parties pour huge amounts of resources every election into this sort of thing and aggressively pursue it. If you really want integrity in elections you should want interested parties to be able to audit the results and mount legal challenges if they feel it is justified (and, yes, that means all interested parties and not just who you consider to be the "good guys").
tclancy
That is some serious whataboutism based on the actions in the last election. One side wants people to be able to vote (some mass too loosely), the other side wants to limit voting to people who attend to agree with them and if it fails, simply hold up the results of negative outcomes until the election is effectively decided.
ImJamal
Maybe we should just go back to the old school way? It seems like there have been grievances about voting machines for so long and it causes distrust to the entire system. The whole hanging chad issue in the 2000 election is a prime example.
dannyobrien
Can somebody point out the "MAGA Oligarch" link here? Scott Leiendecker is a former Republican election official, and the linked article says the company is "repped by" (presumably a PR agency?) that uses Trumpian imagery, but that seems to be the extent of the connection.
(I know that already might seem a lot to some people, but I was wondering if there was anything to justify the title beyond that.)
The fact that a single company has this much potential influence on US elections is the real issue here. The party affiliation of the owner is irrelevant to that.
If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.