Someone on 4chan shared these
letters cosigned by senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Ron Wyden, and congressman Mark Pocan from Warren's website. The letters are dated December 6, 2019. They're not super long, but here's a brief summary.
They basically demand disclosure of the stuff spelled out in
Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which Warren herself had authored a few months prior. Warren was concerned that investment companies might buy controlling interests in voting companies and then, à la Toys R Us, drive the company into the ground to maximize returns.
Warren somewhat coolly suggests that this may already have happened and that the consequences might include:
- voting machine quality suffering
- machine breakage interrupting the vote
- outdated voting machines leaving elections vulnerable to manipulation/fraud
- stripped-down companies being unable to handle the higher maintenance burden
all of which is a big deal because, as we know, production of US voting machines is
concentrated in a handful of companies.
The letter also demands disclosure of any other election technology companies they might be associated with. I assume this had to do with the fear of foreign influence.
A lot of the citations are pretty interesting, but she does cite Vice twice, so... Grain of salt and all that.
A claim made by H.I.G. Capital after it was discovered that a Russian oligarch was somehow entangled with another vote infrastructure company :
"Hart InterCivic said that it “derives independent actual value from this information not being generally known or readily ascertainable and makes reasonable efforts to maintain the secrecy of this information.”
[...]
Hart InterCivic said nearly 80 percent of its ownership is held through an intermediary company by H.I.G. Capital, a Miami, Florida-based private equity firm. Gregg L. Burt, Hart’s board chairman and former CEO and the founder of his own Austin-based private equity firm, owns another 10.5%, the company disclosed."
—
Federal News Network, July 2019 [
Archive]
I don't have a business mind, so can someone please explain how deriving "independent actual value from not being generally known" is a hunky-dory thing to do?
Letter #2—Mike McCarthy, chairman of McCarthy Group LLC* of which
Election Systems & Software (ES&S) is a subsidiary.
The letters cite a scandal involving ES&S voting machines in Philadelphia(footnote 17):
Vote totals in a Northampton County judge’s race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket,
one candidate’s zero votes was a near statistical impossibility.
[...]
Though there has been no conclusive study as to what caused the machines to malfunction, as the machines are locked away for 20 days after an election according to state law, the prevailing theory is that
the touch screens were plagued by a bug in the software.
[...]
“What would have happened if there was a glitch there that got at a 10 percent or 20 percent undercount?” she said. “That worries me. That worries me going forward.”
Ms. Granger noted that there are
nearly 6,300 ExpressVoteXL voting machines in use across the country, and none had experienced similar counting problems to those in Northampton County.
[...]
The lobbying firm for E.S.&S. had donated $1,000 in 2013 to the campaign of Al Schmidt, one of the city commissioners, and again to a group supporting his re-election effort in 2018. They also spent more than $27,000 in direct lobbying of Mr. Schmidt.
Mr. Schmidt made a visit to only one company’s headquarters: E.S.&S.
In total, E.S.&S. spent more than
$425,000 in lobbying expenses related to the City of Philadelphia."
—
The New York Times, November 2019 [
Archive]
A 2019 candidate in a county using ES&S's ExpressVoteXL recieved a statistically impossible number of votes—just 164/55k. The candidate still won. I'm sure if it had been a close loss this would have been a very big deal.
- Is there any chance that the counties that reported an F curve were using this machine?
- Alternatively, could this have been a sign of shenanigans upballot like the missing senate votes?
I don't fully understand the web surrounding Dominion yet, but this lame press release is the only thing I found talking about both entities.
Staple Street Capital acquired Dominion Voting Systems Corp., a maker of electronic voting hardware, alongside company management.
The Toronto company provides election tabulation products to governments. Dominion Voting, which also has offices in Denver, makes universal tabulators and ballot marking devices, optical scan tabulators and central count products under the ImageCast and Democracy Suite EMS brands.
—
Wall Street Journal, July 2018 [
Archive]
I'm very surprised that Dominion is based in Canada. It's pretty strange how easy it was to find controversial happenings about the other two companies.
It's interesting that Warren and Klobuchar both suspected that there were serious problems with the voting machines even before the Democrat primary. They gave the companies a deadline to respond by December 19, 2019, so their responses must be somewhere.
EDIT: Forgot to attach the letters
www.politifact.com
