Are Dominion Voting Systems Changing? It depends: NPR

When Scott Leiendecker announced he was buying Dominion Voting Systems — the election technology company at the heart of countless 2020 election conspiracy theories — he talked about a transformation.

“As of today, Dominion is no more,” reads the first line of a press release that appears to many readers to rely on the unfounded rumors that have swirled around the company (and led to hundreds of millions of dollars in defamation settlements) since Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

“We are turning the page and beginning the vital work of restoring confidence in America’s elections,” Leiendecker wrote in a public letter posted on the website of his new company, Liberty Vote.

But privately, when we talk with the company’s official county election clients, the message is different, raising the question of how much the company plans to change.

“Please be assured that Liberty Vote shares the same values ​​as Dominion,” company representatives in Georgia, which has a statewide contract with the company, wrote in an email reviewed by NPR and sent to counties after the sale was announced. “Same team, same support, different name.”

In Colorado, where Dominion was headquartered and 60 of the 64 counties have a contract with the company, Molly Fitzpatrick, who is the Democratic clerk for Boulder County, spoke with Leiendecker shortly after the sale and helped facilitate another call to include all clerks in the state.

“He reiterated that he was an election expert and had a long history of being involved in elections,” Fitzpatrick said.

After serving as Republican elections director in St. Louis 20 years ago, Leiendecker launched a company, KNOWiNK, in 2011 that became the largest provider of voter registration technology in the United States.

And while the messaging on Liberty Vote’s website highlights KNOWiNK’s ubiquity in U.S. elections, Liberty Vote’s press release does not mention KNOWiNK and describes Leiendecker as an outsider, calling him a “nationally recognized advocate for election reform.”

Leiendecker did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.

The partisan tone of a press release

The press release announcing Dominion’s sale gave a nod to conservative election priorities, highlighting Liberty Vote’s 100% American ownership and its mission to “restore public confidence in the electoral process through transparent, secure, and trustworthy voting systems, including the use of hand-marked paper ballots.”

Liberty Vote also promised to comply with Trump’s March executive order on election security, which was largely suspended by federal judges.

David Becker, who directs the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said he couldn’t recall an election salesman seeking advertising the way Liberty Vote did and that the partisan tone of the ad could generate even more suspicion around the company than existed before.

“I thought the ad was weird — I’ll be honest,” Becker said. “It’s raised a lot of questions from election officials. They’re already under siege. There’s already so much misinformation going around about voting systems and their security. … They don’t want drama around their voting systems.”

Some in the election world see the difference between public and private messages as a rebrand aimed at capitalizing on the doubts people have about the election, rather than turning the company into a partisan entity.

As a state voting official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the sale, told NPR: “(Leiendecker) sees an opportunity to sell Dominion to all the conservative jurisdictions that wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole for the last five years.” »

“For him, it’s just business,” the official said.

“Is this a GOP takeover?”

Some Colorado employees were frustrated that they received no notice before the sale was made public.

“We received no notification that this was even a conversation,” said Tiffany Lee, a politically unaffiliated clerk in southwest Colorado’s La Plata County. “It concerns me that we have not gotten any information from (Liberty Vote) directly or from Dominion.”

The announcement — along with Leiendecker’s history as a Republican elections official — also raised questions among some voters. Lee said, “It was, ‘Is this a GOP takeover? Is the election going to happen? What’s going on?’ Probably one of the biggest questions I get asked is, ‘Are we still going to have elections?'”

Lee and other election officials are calling for calm, saying nothing about the equipment used to scan and count votes is changing, even in the short term. In most cases, voters whose ballots were counted using Dominion technology in 2024 will have their votes counted in the 2026 midterms using the same machines.

“From a safety and technical standpoint, everything is still valid,” said Fitzpatrick, the Boulder County clerk. “We still have several checks and balances to demonstrate and verify the integrity of the system. Everything we have been saying for years is still the same.”

Sale May Not Satisfy Conspiracy Theorists

Like most of the country, Colorado is a paper-voting state, and by law all Colorado counties conduct risk-limiting audits after each election, checking scanner counts against actual votes on original paper ballots.

Even though audits and hand counts have shown the state’s election results to be accurate, Colorado is at the epicenter of election misrepresentations.

This fact leads many to question whether a marketing campaign can actually gain buy-in from those who are convinced that Dominion was involved in stealing the election.

Indeed, after the sale was announced, conservative activist and podcaster Joe Oltmann, a prominent Colorado-based election denier, blasted Leiendecker in a Facebook post.

“This guy is not a conservative…I really hate what our country has become…it’s literally a cartel wearing different badges while stealing votes in a sea of ​​betrayal,” Oltmann posted.

NPR’s Miles Parks reported from Washington, D.C. and Colorado Public Radio Bente Birkeland reported from Colorado.