America’s Electronic Voting System is Corrupted to the Core

Jennifer Cohn
­Sep 7, 2019·14 min read
By Jennifer Cohn @jennycohn1
September 7, 2019
Updated June 24, 2020
Introduction
We can’t fix that which we don’t understand. The dark underbelly of America’s staggeringly insecure voting system is no exception. Without knowledge of the following facts, the American public is at grave risk of being scammed by pretend fixes to a system that is corrupted to the core.
The centralization of America’s election system.
Just two vendors — Election Systems & Software, LLC (ES&S) and Dominion Voting — account for eighty percent of US election equipment. Thus, corrupt insiders or foreign hackers could wreak havoc on elections throughout the United States by infiltrating either of these vendors.
Corrupt insiders?
ES&S and Dominion are both owned by private equity, which means we don’t know who funds and controls them.
ES&S, which by itself accounts for 44 percent of US election equipment, received its initial financing from the families of Nelson Bunker Hunt and Howard Ahmanson, Jr., right-wing billionaires who also contributed substantially to the Chalcedon Foundation, Christian Reconstruction’s main think tank.
Hunt and Ahmanson were also prominent early members of the Council for National Policy, a networking group for the Religious Right and billionaires whose recent members have included Kelly Anne Conway, Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, Richard DeVos, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, Robert and Rebekka Mercer, and Bob Dallas, a convicted embezzler whose nonprofits have been closely linked to massive voter data leaks.
In 2000, ES&S’s founder, Bob Urosevich, was appointed President and Chief Operating Officer of another mega-vendor, Global Election Systems, which later changed its name to Diebold and was acquired by ES&S in 2009. Urosevich’s brother remained at ES&S the whole time as a Senior VP.
It was a Global/Diebold voting machine that “lost” 16,000 Gore votes in the 2000 presidential election in which George W. Bush was declared victorious over Al Gore by just 537 votes in Florida. The “Volusia error” was discovered only because an alert poll worker happened to notice Gore’s total dropping which should never happen — absent fraud or error. It is unknown whether other machines experienced similar issues because Bush — with an assist from future Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts — succeeded in stopping the recount