Read on Twitter
Republican just want ES&S to control 70% of the market again. Real election-integrity advocates don’t carve around the many problems w/ ES&S voting systems, ES&S’s corruption, its use of remote access & cellular modems, & the black votes that vanished from Its systems. 1/ https://twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1273282061923577857
3/ “Experts find nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems [from ES&S] connected to internet” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/online-vulnerable-experts-find-nearly-three-dozen-u-s-voting-n1112436
4/ “Voting machine vendor [ES&S] treated election officials to trips to Vegas, elsewhere” http://www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article213558729.html
5/ “Exclusive: Thousands of Black Votes in Georgia Disappeared [from ES&S/Diebold voting systems]. and No One Can Explain It” https://www.theroot.com/exclusive-thousands-of-black-votes-in-georgia-disappea-1832472558
6/ ES&S received its initial financing from the families of Christian Fundamentalist billionaires. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/12/nation-under-god/
7/ ES&S has donated $30k to the Republican State Legislative Council since 2013. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/11/05/voting-machines-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/
8/ The DOJ’s anti-trust division forced ES&S to dissolve its subsidiary, Diebold, and sell some of its assets in 2010 because ES&S at that point had cornered 70% of the US election equipment market. I explain here. https://legacy.tyt.com/2018/08/17/kobachs-kansas-victory-tainted-by-kobachs-election-system/
9/ This is when Dominion entered the US market. It bought Diebold’s intellectual property rights & bought a smaller subsidiary called Sequoua. But ES&S kept some (I suspect most) of Diebold’s servicing & maintenance contracts, so the break up was not as substantial as some think.
10/ In 2017, the Wharton business school estimated that ES&S controlled 44% of the market and Dominion 37%. https://trustthevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2017-whartonoset_industryreport.pdf
11/ But I suspect ES&S has more control than Wharton’s analysis suggests. As I recall, it Wharton put all Diebold jurisdictions in the Dominion column even if ES&S retained the Diebold contracts. IMO, contracts are where most of the control of electrons comes from.
12/ ES&S presumably took at least somewhat of a hit, though, when the DOJ broke it up in 2010 & Dominion entered the market. Rs apparently want to give ES&S a near monopoly again. I’m no fan of any of these vendors, but increasing ES&S’s control will make things much worse.
