What the Dominion Voting Acquisition and Rebrand to Liberty Vote Means for US Elections
Last week’s announcement that Dominion Voting Systems has been acquired by Scott Leiendecker, founder and CEO of Missouri-based electronic poll book manufacturer Knowink, has left U.S. election integrity advocates uncertain about what the deal could mean—if anything—for voters and the credibility of American elections.
Leiendecker, a former Republican Party operative and Missouri election director before founding Knowink, announced in a press release that he is rebranding Dominion (which maintains headquarters in both Canada and the U.S.) as Liberty Vote. The move is framed as “a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America” and to distance the company from false 2020 claims by former President Donald Trump and his allies that Dominion rigged the presidential election to hand victory to Joe Biden.
Liberty’s announcement lays out several key pledges: the rebranded company will be 100% American-owned, it will center its work on hand-marked paper ballots, it will “prioritize facilitating third-party auditing,” and it is “committed to domestic staffing and software development.” Yet the press release offered no concrete details to explain what any of these commitments will look like in practice.
Dominion is the second-largest voting machine provider in the U.S., with its systems used in 27 states (including every county in Georgia). For 20 years, the company has developed its software in Canada and Belgrade, Serbia, and LinkedIn searches confirm dozens of programmers and other staff based in Serbia list Dominion as their employer.
Liberty has not clarified whether it plans to rewrite all existing code written by these foreign workers—a project that would require overhauling hundreds of thousands of lines of code—or whether it will relocate foreign developers to the U.S. or replace them entirely with American programmers (Dominion already has a U.S. headquarters in Colorado). An anonymous Liberty official told WIRED only that Leiendecker “is committed to 100 percent … domestic staffing and software development.” But an unnamed source told CNN that Liberty will keep operations running in Canada, where Dominion machines are used nationwide.
Philip Stark, a statistics professor at UC Berkeley and longtime election integrity advocate, calls the promise of all-domestic staff a red herring. “If the claim is that this is somehow a security measure, it isn’t. Because programmers based in the U.S. also … may be interested in undermining or altering election integrity,” he told WIRED.
When it comes to the third-party audits cited in the press release, a Liberty official told WIRED this commitment means the company will complete a “third-party, top-to-bottom, independent review of [Dominion] software and equipment in a timely manner” and will work closely with federal and state certification agencies to disclose any vulnerabilities, to build voter confidence in machines and results. The company has not released a timeline for the review, but a Liberty representative told Axios it will be finished ahead of next year’s midterm elections, and the company will “rebuild or retire” machines as needed.
But Stark and other election experts argue this timeline is unrealistic, and the pledge appears aimed only at winning over right-wing critics of Dominion. “There isn’t time between now and 2026 to design, test, and certify new voting equipment,” Stark says. Federal and state testing and certification is expensive and can take months, depending on the scope of changes to voting systems. Many states also have legal restrictions on how close to an election voting system updates can be rolled out. If Liberty follows through on replacing foreign Dominion staff with U.S. workers, that will only slow the review and rebuilding process even more.
Stark, who developed the risk-limiting audit procedures used in many jurisdictions to verify election result integrity, adds that only post-election audits of paper ballots can actually guarantee the validity of election outcomes. An audit of voting software cannot confirm a machine has not been tampered with, because software and hardware configurations can be altered after auditing and certification is complete. Software audits can only spot existing vulnerabilities, and most of Dominion’s known vulnerabilities were already identified by independent third-party cybersecurity experts in past reviews. If Liberty rewrites Dominion’s existing code, the new version would require a full new audit to catch vulnerabilities introduced during the recoding process.
The Shrinking Voting Industry
The acquisition caught Dominion’s government customers off guard last week. Leiendecker reportedly held a Friday conference call with Colorado county election clerks, who expressed anger that they learned of the sale from media reports rather than directly from the company. Clerks pressed Leiendecker on past conspiracy claims about Dominion and his plans for the business. Liberty’s sparse new website currently only features a brief note from Leiendecker on its homepage confirming the company is “100% American‐owned.”
The acquisition is not actually a surprise, however. Knowink and Dominion have worked closely for years: Dominion has long used Knowink as a subcontractor when bidding for election contracts, to offer customers a full turnkey election solution that includes both voting machines and poll books. Leiendecker’s purchase also continues a long trend of consolidation in the U.S. voting industry.
For the past two decades, there have only been three major voting machine manufacturers in the U.S., with ownership shifting constantly through mergers and acquisitions. Today the top three, ranked by size, are Election Systems & Software, Dominion (now Liberty Vote), and Hart InterCivic.
Dominion was founded in 2003 in Toronto, and did not become a major U.S. player until 2010, when it acquired two existing voting firms: Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) and Sequoia Voting Systems. Premier/Diebold exited the election business after facing ongoing criticism over security flaws in its systems and lingering public distrust over its close ties to the Republican Party (its former CEO was a major fundraiser for George W. Bush). Sequoia left the industry largely due to financial struggles. With his purchase of Dominion, Leiendecker now also owns all remaining assets of Premier/Diebold and Sequoia—including equipment, software, and staff—that Dominion still held.
The deal gives Leiendecker control of election infrastructure in more than half of U.S. states. Dominion equipment is used across 26 states plus Puerto Rico. Knowink’s electronic poll books, which replace traditional paper poll books for verifying voter eligibility at precinct check-in, are used in 29 states plus Washington, D.C. Fourteen states have jurisdictions that use both Dominion voting machines and Knowink poll books, covering 20 million registered voters. That means companies controlled by Leiendecker now own every step of the election process in these jurisdictions, from voter verification through ballot casting and results tabulation. Georgia uses both systems statewide: Knowink poll books integrate directly with Dominion voting machines, after a voter’s smart card is encoded in the poll book, it is inserted into a Dominion machine to pull up the voter’s digital ballot.
Even so, many question why Leiendecker would pursue Dominion, as the voting machine industry has never been especially profitable. A 2017 study estimated the entire U.S. industry brings in just $300 million in annual revenue, with Dominion’s annual revenue estimated at roughly $100 million at the time. Unlike corporate IT systems that are replaced every three to five years, voting systems are only updated once a decade or longer. Vendors typically rely on long-term maintenance and service contracts to stay solvent while competing for new equipment contracts.
It remains unclear what Dominion is valued at today. In 2018, Dominion’s management team partnered with private equity firm Staple Street Capital to buy a controlling stake, when the company was valued at $80 million. A more recent accounting report, prepared to support Dominion’s damage claim in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News, estimated the company would have been worth $741 million in December 2020 if not for Fox’s false election-rigging claims. The Liberty official who spoke with WIRED would not disclose how much Leiendecker paid for Dominion or whether any other parties contributed funding, only confirming that Leiendecker “is the sole owner and he privately financed” the acquisition.
Rife With Speculation
On social media, users have raised concerns that Leiendecker’s close ties to the Republican Party motivated his purchase of Dominion, and have questioned whether he endorses the baseless 2020 conspiracy theories about the company. Additional questions have been sparked by recent settlements of Dominion’s high-profile defamation lawsuits, as well as Leiendecker’s longstanding connection to Trump ally Ed Martin. Leiendecker has not responded to requests for comment on these concerns.
After the 2020 election, right-wing Trump supporters falsely claimed Dominion had ties to Venezuela (confusing the company with Smartmatic, a different voting firm founded by Venezuelan engineers) and rigged the election for Biden. Dominion filed $1.6 billion defamation lawsuits against right-wing outlets Fox News and One America News Network (OAN) for amplifying the false claims. It also filed $1.3 billion suits against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and former Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
Fox News settled its suit for $787.5 million in 2023, and Newsmax recently settled for $67 million. Just last month, Dominion reached undisclosed settlement agreements with OAN, Powell, and Giuliani. These settlements were a required condition of Leiendecker’s acquisition of Dominion. Dominion still has pending suits against Lindell and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. The Liberty official told WIRED those cases will also wrap up soon, writing in an email: “All litigation has been resolved or is in the process of being resolved.” But Stefanie Lambert, Byrne’s attorney, told WIRED: “There is no settlement. Dr. Byrne is looking forward to trial.” A lawyer for Lindell did not respond to an inquiry, but Lindell told Infowars this week he will never settle with Dominion.
The settlements have sparked debate over whether Leiendecker simply wanted to avoid taking on ongoing costly litigation, or whether he did right-wing defendants a favor by forcing Dominion to accept settlement terms favorable to them. Leiendecker has not responded to questions about the undisclosed settlement terms.
While Leiendecker has not publicly addressed his stance on 2020 election conspiracy theories directly, his response to an election dispute more than a decade ago suggests he has framed election integrity as a top priority, even when it put him at odds with political allies. According to Axios, Missouri’s Republican secretary of state appointed Leiendecker to investigate St. Louis election administration after problems arose during the 2000 election there. He was then hired by Ed Martin to serve as Republican director of the St. Louis City Board of Election Commissioners from 2005 to 2009.
Martin, now a staunch Trump ally who endorses the former president’s stolen election claims, currently serves as U.S. pardon attorney, and previously worked as interim U.S. attorney for D.C. under the first Trump administration, where he demoted prosecutors working on January 6 insurrection cases. Back in 2005, he chaired the St. Louis City Election Board when he hired Leiendecker. Five years after hiring Leiendecker, Martin ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican against an incumbent Democrat, with backing from the St. Louis Tea Party. Just like after Trump’s 2020 loss, Martin alleged vote counting irregularities, a Tea Party spokesperson called the election “stolen,” and Martin refused to concede. Instead of supporting his former boss, Leiendecker publicly disputed the stolen election claim at the time, saying there were “no shenanigans” and challenged critics (including Martin, per St. Louis Public Radio) to prove their allegations. During his tenure leading the St. Louis elections board, Leiendecker was widely praised by both parties for improving board procedures and processing votes more efficiently than previous leadership.
Paper Chase
Leiendecker has stated in Liberty’s press releases and media comments that the company is committed to building election technology centered on “hand-marked paper ballots” in “compliance with President Trump's executive order.”
Acting on his false 2020 election rigging claims, Trump has called for all U.S. elections to use paper ballots, and his March 2024 executive order requires all voting systems to use or produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot that voters can review to confirm machines did not alter their votes. Some media outlets have interpreted Leiendecker’s comments to mean he aligns with Trump’s push to ban any systems that do not produce a paper record. The Liberty official who spoke with WIRED said Leiendecker only meant that Liberty will offer products that “enable compliance with federal and state standards”—whatever those standards end up being. Current national voting system guidelines encourage states to use systems that produce a paper record but cannot require it; states retain full authority to set their own voting rules under the U.S. Constitution, and Trump’s executive order is currently being litigated in court.
Notably, Trump’s executive order also calls for states to stop using paper ballots that include bar codes or QR codes to record and tabulate votes, because these codes are not human-readable. These ballots are produced by ballot-marking devices (BMDs): voting systems that let voters make selections through a touchscreen tablet or other assistive device, which then prints a paper ballot showing the voter’s selections that the voter can read and verify. The ballot is then run through an optical scanner to record and tabulate results.
Most BMDs print a bar code or QR code encoded with the voter’s choices on the ballot, and it is this encoded portion that scanners read to tabulate votes, not the human-readable text that voters verify. Ironically, just like Trump, election integrity activists on both the left and right have long opposed bar code/QR code ballots for security reasons: bad actors could theoretically program systems to print the correct selection on the human-readable portion, while encoding a different choice in the machine-readable code that the scanner counts.
Dominion produces a BMD called the ImageCast X, most models of which print ballots with QR codes. According to Verified Voting, which tracks U.S. election equipment usage, ImageCast X machines are used in all or parts of 15 states, including statewide use in Georgia— the key swing state that was the center of widespread 2020 election controversy.
Many election integrity activists want states that use these BMDs to only tabulate votes from the human-readable portion of the ballot, not the bar code or QR code, or to switch entirely to hand-marked paper ballots— the exact outcome Trump is currently calling for.