1) Anyone passingly familiar bidding for state government projects won’t be surprised by this.

It is an unspoken fact in the US that the only thing that approaches the depth of Federal pockets is that of State and local governments. https://twitter.com/LokiJulianus/status/1333797270500696071

2) As you approach state and local levels, you trade the raw money-printing power of the Feds with increasingly less oversight and regulation, until companies can literally sell societal snake oil, certified by ‘professional boards’ staffed by THEIR OWN employees and lobbyists.

3) What happens as a result of this self-propagating scam artistry of state and local government ‘consultants’, ‘contractors’, etc is that they conglomerate and merge together, each new company buying the old ones and repackaging the disasters under a new brand name.

4) Education it is EGREGIOUS. A small handful of companies with ever-shifting names and a laundry list of lobbyists flooding the offices of state education departments and local school boards cycle through the US changing names every decade or two and selling the same idiocy.

5) NCLB and Obama’s reforms? All THEY did was make it MANDATORY for state governments to pay these companies millions for snake oil to make it *look* like they were making improvements to schools!

So let’s cycle back to voting.

What happened?

6) States are under constant pressure to change their voting procedures, whether it be because ‘muh racism’, previous clusterfucks, or for their bureaucrats in charge of their voting procedures to make it look like they’re doing something.

7) But the appointments to oversee voting mechanisms, these are BY DEFINITION political appointments. The people appointed often clueless and hire people from the companies providing new voting equipment/etc, or if appointed for ‘experience’ used to work for those same companies!

8) You ask why all these former dominion employees are in the state and local voting bureaucracies? While Dominion seems to be this corporate hydra?

BECAUSE THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR OVER A GENERATION NOW.

These people ARE THE voting industry!

9) It is literally a trust, a cartel, an oligopoly of a few companies who all ‘certify’ each other’s bullshit, and each have their own network of employees embedded within state and local governments to make sure the million dollar checks keep getting written for the newest shit!

10) And the worst part?

In 10 years, it will be a NEW company, called Verify or some simple shit like that, who buys up all Dominion’s assets, hired all their employees, cuts checks to all the state and local contacts, then repackages and sells THE SAME SHIT for another few mil.

11) And as everyone gasps in horror going ‘OMG look at all these terrible products and look at all these former employees in state and local governments!’, y’all will have forgotten about THIS TIME, just like we all forgot the dumbasses from 2000 Dominion bought up in turn.

/end