This may be the scariest thing you’ll read all week:
Dominion Voting Systems — the voting machine behemoth that President Trump and his allies baselessly attacked after the 2020 election — has been sold to a Missouri-based company run by a former Republican election official, Axios has learned.
Dominion is one of the biggest election equipment providers and was used by 27 states during the 2024 election.
Liberty Vote purchased Canada-based Dominion for an undisclosed sum, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
Liberty is a new company owned by Scott Leiendecker, who in 2011 created a software program focused on enabling election workers to verify voters and check them in at polling locations.
According to Leiendecker’s LinkedIn page, his company KNOWiNK has more than 150 employees and $55 million in annual revenue.
The company says its systems are used by election officials in more than a third of U.S. states and describes itself as the “nation’s leading provider of electronic poll books.”
Leiendecker also has deep Republican connections.
Matt Blunt, who was then Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, appointed Leiendecker to a role investigating St. Louis’ elections administration after the 2000 election.
As governor, Blunt later appointed Leiendecker to be St. Louis’ Republican election director.
Ed Martin, a loyal Trump surrogate, was St. Louis’ Board of Elections’ chair when Leiendecker was the city’s election director.
This is not good.
I hate getting too hysterical about the election system.Local officials are still in charge and there’s no reason to suspect right now that they are going to cheat on Republicans’ behalf. My feeling has always been that Trump’s game plan is to contest the election after the fact and try to hold up the process or possibly even have his henchmen refuse to seat Democrats. But you never know. Regardless of anything else, having a right wing partisan owning voting machines is guaranteed to reduce the trust in the system even more than it already is.