Meet the new boss at Dominion, not like the old boss
Dominion Voting systems has been acquired by founder and chairman of Liberty Vote Scott Leiendecker, in a deal which included dropping lawsuits against conservatives.
Leiendecker, former GOP election reform advocate, has officially become the sole owner of Dominion after making the deal contingent on dropping several remaining lawsuits against prominent conservatives and One America News Network (OANN).
The “prominent conservatives” are Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy; Rudy Giuliani; and Sidney Powell.
Of all the accusations of fraud in the 2020 elections, the ones against Dominion seemed the weakest. But – as I’ve said from the start about all the 2020 fraud allegations – once you change the rules from the old paper ballot routine, especially with computers and mail-in voting, you need to increase safeguards to the point where voters trust in your accuracy and fairness. In 2020, the public was not feeling that ballot security was in place, and so whichever party had lost that election, that party would have claimed fraud. There is no question in my mind that had Biden lost, the Democrats would have screamed fraud because even prior to the election they were complaining about Dominion too (see this from 2019, for example, as well as this from the same year).
So why didn’t many Democrats claim fraud in 2024, when Trump won? The first reason was that it wasn’t especially close, and the second reason was that the voting patterns showed a shift to Trump in almost every county and in almost every demographic. That would be hard to fake. Another reason is that many states tightened up the mail-in ballot rules that had been put in place so hastily in 2020 with the excuse of COVID.
Now Dominion’s new owner Leiendecker is determined to create a product in which people have more trust. I say, “good luck”:
“Liberty Vote signals a new chapter for American elections — one where trust is rebuilt from the ground up,” Leiendecker stated in the press release. “Liberty Vote is committed to delivering election technology that prioritizes paper-based transparency, security, and simplicity so that voters can be assured that every ballot is filled-in accurately and fairly counted.”
In addition, the company is prioritizing the use of hand-marked paper ballots to strengthen election security and compliance.
Sounds promising.
That’s a tall mountain!
Scott Adams has proposed a secure voting phone app, many times. It absolutely goes against his rule of, “If it matters, and it can be hacked, it will be hacked.”
Paper ballots counted by machines are fine because they can be audited. Minnesota does this; not sure about other states.
But voting on a screen? No, no, never. The key is to keep fraudulent ballots away from the counter and out of the ballot box. No harvesting, mail ballots kept to a strict minimum, no election day registration.
I’ve been uneasy for decades about the lack of paper ballots. Texas, to my relief, switched several years ago to a hybrid electronic voting method that included paper ballots in the mix. The votes are cast on an easy interactive screen, then are mechanically marked on a paper ballot, which you can review before depositing it into an electronic reader. Of course the reader could be jimmied, but there always is a paper trail. Anyone trying to jimmy the electronics knows that he might be caught if auditors find a mismatch with the stack of paper ballots.
It’s more about a fear of being caught than making it literally impossible to interfere.
I’m thrilled by this development, by the way, because it’s like Musk buying X: conservatives need to compete directly by obtaining ownership of critical infrastructure. That goes for the press, the publishing houses, voting machines, schools, you name it.
I don’t trust Dominion and won’t ever I think from the very first book I read on voting right after the 2016 election about voting and computer hacking.
No matter what you think of Dominion they take a simple addition problem and convert it to a extreme problem. A adding machine would do just fine.
What we benefit from are paper ballots which can be counted by hand if necessary. To assist precinct staff, have optical scanners which are not connected in a network. The precinct staff can fill out and attest hard copy tallies, report the tallies via e-mail to a central tabulation center, and deliver them to a satellite office after closing the precinct.
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At most, about 13% of the electorate should be voting by post. Have the ballots in the mail by the 17th of September and have certified teams of inspectors at the board of elections (one Republican, one Democratic) undertake signature checks piecemeal as the ballots in their mailers are returned. The rejected ballots would be placed in one lock box. The approved ballots would then be stored in a different set of metal cabinets. Both would have two lcoks – one operated by the Republican commissioner of elections, one by the Democratic commissioner. Your last day of signature checks is on the day in-person voting begins. Anything arriving later is placed in a lockbox and the contents are mailed back to voters with a note of regret after vote totals are finally certified.
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As for in-person voting, it should begin the Friday evening after All Saints Day. You have precincts open for four hours, close, then re-open at 7:00 am Saturday. The queue closes at 6:00 pm and you begin tabulating the in-person ballots once the queue clears. The tabulation of postal ballots would begin at noon on Saturday and be complete by the time the polls close.
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This is one area where technology has been misapplied, and computer science faculty studying the problem warned us nearly twenty years ago in scholarly articles.
Nobody seems to care, but we’d benefit from rejiggering the electoral calendar.
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A. Have all offices subject to competitive elections or retention-in-office referenda be chosen for four year terms bar judges. Have judges chosen for whole-number multiples of four years. This way you can have comprehensible quadrennial cycles.
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B. For your November elections, chose federal offices in year one; chose municipal councils, county councils, mayors, and county executives in year two; chose the governor and state legislature in year three; choose offices not otherwise specified in year four.
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C. Hold primary elections on the Friday and Saturday which falls during the period running from 24 August to 31 August.
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D. On the Friday and Saturday falling during the period running from 18 May through 25 May have referenda on ballot propositions, retention-in-office referenda on the judiciary, competitive elections for the judiciary, and one or the other for certain offices auxilliary or adjacent to the judiciary (corporation counsel, state attorney-general, DA, sheriff, &c). Hold contests for appellate courts and oddball trial courts any year, your general superior court the 1st and 3d year of a quadrennial cycle, your municipal courts the 2d year, and other courts the 4th year.
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Make it the default setting that (school boards excepted), no special-function offices (be they boards, executives, or quasi-executives) be subject to retention-in-office referenda or competitive election. With that the default, such offices could be made elective by a petition campaign and referendum. If an office is made elective, the question can be revisited by a petition campaign and referendum once every six years; if the question has not been revisited in 30 years, an automatic referendum is held. When the question is posed, people might decide it is not necessary that the town clerk or county treasurer or secretary of state be an elected official.
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Another thing you can stop doing is electing ceremonial offices (e.g. Lt. Governor) and in case of vacancies prescribes an order of succession among department heads in a government who succeed to a general executive position for a period of time until a college of elected officials convenes to chose a successor to serve until the next popular election.
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Some years back, I saw a montage someone had put together of dems worrying about whether Dominion machines could be hacked or had external connections. It reminded me of having seen such reservations.
It was later that they became iron-clad. Still, there’d be a report that an “expert” in a trial someplace, or a demonstration, or some other venue, would change the results with a pencil. Used as a tool, apparently, not a recording device. But nothing followed. Something else similar months later…nothing.
no election day registration.
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Agreed. Allow anyone who has reached the age of 17 to register. You have flow checks by teams of clerks (one Democratic, one Republican) of each new registration form received. (If the form is filled out defectively, it is mailed back with a standard form describing the deficiency; if it fails a series of database checks, ditto). You have biennial stock checks of the whole database, with each letter of the alphabet checked during the same period of weeks of the biennium. You publish the voter roll twice a year – on the last Friday of March and on the first Friday of September. The first publication delineates who is eligible to sign petitions due in mid-July and who is eligible to vote in May and in August. The second delineates who is eligible to vote in November and sign petitions due the end of January. Those under 18 who have registered would be eligible on their 18th birthday rather than on the date of publication.
I just voted by mail in the California gerrymandering election. They mailed a ballot to my house along with a return envelope. I filled out the ballot, signed the outside of the envelope, and dropped it in a mailbox. I signed up at the state “Where’s my ballot” website. I have to admit they put on an impressive show. The next day I got a text message saying that the post office had my ballot and was going to deliver it to the county election office. Today, two days later, I got another text message saying they had counted and registered my vote.
The process is full of holes. I’ve seen articles that the voter rolls are totally unaudited so they mail ballots to people who moved or never lived at a location They allow ballot harvesting. Not only allowed, but encouraged. They also allow an abomination called ballot curing where, if under very loose standards, they decide the signature does not match the voter, they allow the usually government union members to go to the voter and get them to re-sign. They allow election day registration, and count ballots that arrive up to 30 days after the election.
I voted anyway. This allows the possibility of my vote to count. If I don’t vote, there’s no chance. The process seems to work sometimes when ballot propositions that the Democrats totally oppose are passed. And hopefully rejected this time around.
What an amazing group of buyers – all people who have had serious legal problems dealing with the 2020 election. It makes me wonder if they have not bought Dominion, hoping to prove that it was compromised in the election.
Mr. Bill. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
It makes me wonder if they have not bought Dominion, hoping to prove that it was compromised in the election.
Mr. Bill:
I wonder about that. And I wonder if they can find fraud in the machines or company records at this point in time.
The Biden administration, DOJ, and FBI left behind more evidence to be found than I expected.
Re: Dominion buyers maybe have an investigative intention?
Yes, please!!!
Huxley: “The Biden administration, DOJ, and FBI left behind more evidence to be found than I expected.”
Ditto! Absolutely stunning!!
Current secretaries, directors, & staff have to be at the top of their game to make the most of it all!
Keeping the remaining swamp out of the way & unable to mess it up is a headache, I bet.
Art Deco: “Nobody seems to care, but we’d benefit from rejiggering the electoral calendar.”
I agree. Changes would greatly improve.
But my first take on “rejiggering the calendar”: I wish the Nov. Election would be moved. The weather shouldn’t be able to keep people from voting.
Just saw I put 2016 on my comment and should be 2020.
Mailing out millions of ballots is the problem. Anyone could a ballot not actually mailed to them but still fill it out. The rejection rate is dismally poor because they want every vote to count.
The weather shouldn’t be able to keep people from voting.
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Agreed, though recall that the November date for federal elections was fixed ca. 1855, when transportation was a good deal more difficult.
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Bad weather in early November I think is a midwestern concern. I grew up in Upstate New York, which has no shortage of challenging winter weather, but it usually does not hit until about Christmas time. (The trouble with places who do not experience winter is that they don’t have the equipment or the institutional memory to recover from the occasional storm).
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Maybe move everything back a month and have elections in April, July, and October.
Mailing out millions of ballots is the problem. Anyone could a ballot not actually mailed to them but still fill it out.
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You shouldn’t have spot orders of absentee ballots. You should have standing orders which have to be renewed quadrennially at the initiative of the voter. People eligible would be (1) civilian employees of the federal government posted abroad, and any spouse in country with them; (2) servicemen and any spouse residing with them; (3) persons under 25 enrolled at a campus with residences; (4) miscellaneous persons who are eligible to vote but currently resident in institutional group quarters; (5) homebound persons (so classified because their regular doctor has filled out a standard form); (6) people who travel frequently for work (so classified because their supervisor has filled out a standard form); (7) people who live more than ten miles driving distance from the nearest polling station (known to the board of elections staff because they have a gazetteer of such addresses).
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The number of polling stations per resident differs wildly from one state to another. In New York when I was involved in local politics, you had one precinct per 1,000 residents; the national mean is about 1 per 3,000 residents – close to what it is in Massachusetts; Georgia has those bloody long queues that the national media show when they want to push a ‘voter suppression’ bushwah because they have only 1 per 6,000. IIRC, some states now vote entirely by mail.
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That we’re voting on the mid-19th century market day is an indication of how brainless and barnacle-laden our public institutions are. About 12% of the adult population is typically at work on Saturday. You’ll have shorter queues because people can shamble in throughout the day, though you’ll still have procrastinators who won’t show up until the last hour.
marc elias, the danchenko dossier enabler designed this strategy, how is it that a dozen seats are taken in california, we end up being four senate seats short in state’s we carried,
of course they pretended that the halderman investigation that they aired in the spring and fall of 2020, didn’t happen,
Marlene wrote ” I wish the Nov. Election would be moved. The weather shouldn’t be able to keep people from voting.”
I don’t know where weather is a problem on the first Tuesday of November; maybe the U.P. of Michigan?
One could also say “don’t have elections in summertime; people are too busy out having fun.”
Selfy: Bad winter weather has affected voter turnout, & yes of course that’s mostly in northern places.
The problem is, most every time possible for the major elections has its problems.
Earlier fall risks storms & hurricanes.
Summer: too many complain about interrupting travel.
Spring — of course spring break, and then “school finals”.
Still, maybe tax day would be better.
Lol.
Art Deco: “Maybe move everything back a month and have elections in April, July, and October.”
Yes, if only we could control hurricanes. It’s sad that they get such a long season to mess up.
Art Deco, re. Your 7:14 am comments:
Yes … big yeses!
We have appallingly lazy & otherwise-motivated people in the way of making such commonsense changes.
As a article at American Thinker points out
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/10/how_important_is_election_privacy_really.html
The official who opens that envelope has sole authority to allow it, no one can believe some Leftists in a big city has anyone to verify they are doing their job 100%
The official who opens that envelope has sole authority to allow it, no one can believe some Leftists in a big city has anyone to verify they are doing their job 100%
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In New York, the legwork is done by the staff of county boards of elections. These are patronage appointees. You have a Democratic commissioner nominated by the Democratic county chairman and a Republican commissioner nominated by the Republican county chairman. Half the staff reports to one, half to the other.
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Ideally, you have a general screening examination the commissioners and all aspirants have to pass, the county chairmen appoint from the pool, and then the commissioners hire and retain whom they please from the pool. All consequential procedures are done jointly by teams of two inspectors.
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Posit some old school procedures.
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About half the population of the U.S. lives in counties with > 430,000 inhabitants and about half lives in those with fewer. In a county with 430,000 inhabitants, you might expect 15,000 postal ballots returned, or (given that they go in the mail in mid-September), just north of 400 per workday. You have the commissioners of elections inspect them in the presence of observers including the party sachems and a municipal court judge selected at random. You have a book of facsimile images for each precinct. That is this year’s register that a voter must sign when he appears at the precinct. All of those with a domicile in that precinct will be in the register, but those with a standing order for a postal ballot will be flagged. Teams of two sort the returned ballots by precinct into piles and retrieve the register for each pile. The commissioners or their vices have a stamp which marks their decision on each. You have the voters identifying information on the inner return mailer (which in turn contains the ballots in an envelope blank except for the precinct). Each commissioner compares the signature and stamps the register with his decision. The ballot passes if you get two approvals. Rejected returns are put in a locked bin with two locks – one for each commissioner. Approved ballots are then carted away for further processing. You have a clutch of locked cabinets, each with two locks. Posit there are a dozen each with a dozen pigeonholes therein and some additional space. For each ballot, the staff opens the mailer with the identifying information and places the envelope with the ballots in it (which has the precinct marked) in the appropriate pigeonhole. The return mailers with the identifying information are placed in a plastic envelope which is sealed, dated, and initialed by the two clerks. This envelope is then dumped in a receptacle kept in the open space in the cabinet. You might also have a printed checklist of all the voters from these dozen or so precincts who have a standing order for a postal ballot. You mark the date on each entry when their ballot was returned and each clerk initials it.
On moving the voting day, yes we in FL do have hurricanes even in Nov., but as the wussy folks we are (or became by moving here) we still admire the hardiness of the folks living in “dreadful” winter climes. Maybe you should just leave that voting day decision alone so as not to reduce our views of your respective heroism in braving your inclement weather.
More seriously, I think the more important issue in today’s world is perhaps moving the voting day closer to the day of change in regime (aka 1/20/XX) so as to avoid or reduce the opportunities for lame duck executive and legislative actions when politicos have been voted out of office. They really should no longer have authority to create or remove policies, people, etc., that are against the anticipated direction of the incoming administration and congress. This is more of a problem now than it would have been in the 1700’s/1800’s.
Clearly the presidential pardon has been abused by all sides while in lame duck status.
Other areas may be too attractive to the heritage regime to not take advantage of this last minute opportunity to damage the “other side”.
R2L: “… moving the voting day closer to the day of change in regime (aka 1/20/XX) so as to avoid or reduce the opportunities for lame duck executive and legislative actions when politicos have been voted out of office…. ”
Ohhh my yes! That’s become a horribly abused window! Nearly 10 weeks open for shenanigans, such as magic autopen abuse by a conscience-free administration.
We’ve seen that and more in spades.
That THAT type of archaic rule still exists … slays me.
More seriously, I think the more important issue in today’s world is perhaps moving the voting day closer to the day of change in regime (aka 1/20/XX) so as to avoid or reduce the opportunities for lame duck executive and legislative actions when politicos have been voted out of office.
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I would tend to disagree with you there. I would like the incoming administration to have a considerable bloc of time (approx 120 days) to assemble a suitable list of appointments for top-echelon positions. Posit that you swear in the new House of Representatives the first week of December, that will give newly elected members some time to assemble their senior staff and find temporary digs in Washington. If abuse of executive clemency concerns you, you could add a provision that the power to pardon and commute sentences (not to grant reprieves) is in abeyance during the period running from a presidential election and the end of a president’s term.
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One thing I think might be agreeable would be to elect the U.S. House and the President in year one of a quadrennial cycle and elect the governors and state / territorial legislatures in year three. Then the state legislatures could then assemble and elect the U.S. Senate.
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Another agreeable modification would be to allow the President to appoint up to a half-dozen VPs with each assigned to supervise a portfolio of departments and agencies. Should the presidency fall vacant, you can have someone drawn from a statutorily defined order-of-succession succeed to the office for a period of eight or nine months . The state and territorial legislatures could assemble about four months after the vacancy appears to elect a new President, who could be given a further four months or so to assemble an administration and could be sworn in at a time of his choosing at some point during that four month period. Should the vacancy occur in the last 18 months or so of an elected president’s term, you could just allow the successor designated by law to finish the term.
The main purpose of the voting machine should be to count the paper ballots Fed into it, and ensure that each paper ballot is counted correctly, then bundled for a later audit, if necessary. Like into 500 or 200 or 100 ballot bundles, with a time stamp and top line count. These bundles should be stored in a regular way, available for hand counting. Every 10th bundle or so should actually be hand counted, with a cessation of use of the machine if the verified hand count is different than the machine.
OTOH, mere paper ballots on election day is likely better, with perhaps a slightly higher cost to pay for precinct workers, only, to count the ballots.
IMO, one thing we can do with the technology which has appeared in the last thirty years is institute a bidding system for slots at each precinct.
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Posit a county with 430,000 residents and 144 precincts. On each shift, you have two chief inspectors (one Republican, one Democratic) and a staff of regular inspectors. The number of inspectors will depend on the population of the precinct and the complexity of the election. Some elections may be complex enough that you have one desk where you sign in and receive a ballot pack for a particular set of offices and a separate desk where you get another pack for a different set of offices. Posit one, two, or three desks with a register at each. Posit two registers at each if you have a large anticipated volume of voters, perhaps one register with those with names beginning with A-I, another with names J-Z.
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Your first shift runs from 5:30 pm to 10:00 pm on Friday, with a mini-shift for the chief inspectors on each end to obtain keys and other items from an assembly point to lock up and return the keys and certain other items to an assembly point. Furniture and other equipment kept in warehouses will have been delivered by that afternoon by contractors. The precinct staff set up for opening at 6:00 pm.
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The second shift runs from about 6:45 am on Saturday (again, with an opening mini-shift for the chief inspectors) with polls opening at 7:00 am. and runs till noon. The third shift begins at noon and runs till about 5:00 pm. The last shift begins at about 4:45 and runs until 10:00 pm, with a mini-shift for the chief inspectors to lock up and return equipment to the assembly point. There may be mandatory overtime ordered by the county commissioners on this shift. This shift is the most consequential. Polls close at 6:00 pm, which means no further additions to the queue. It will take some time to clear the queue, after which tabulation begins. If you have two or three tabulation machines in each precinct, it should not take more than about 2.5 hours to completely tabulate all referenda and first-past-the-post contests and product the first round of any ranked-choice contest.
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So, you have four regular shifts, you have 144 precincts, and you have about three poll inspectors on each side for each shift. Any aspirant poll inspector in the county can bid on any shift in any precinct in the county provided he be a registered Republican or a registered Democrat. For any shift, you submit a preference-ranked list of up to seven precincts in which you’d be willing to work and for each you indicate what you’d accept in payment for your labor. In re a particular shift, the scheduler looks at every precinct where someone has marked it their first choice. If on each side of the partisan divide the number marking the precinct as their first choice exceeds the number of slots, you award the slot(s) to the low bidder(s) unless such an award would have an aspirant poll inspector working back-to-back shifts at different precincts. (Anyone awarded a slot will be paid what they bid). In re any aspirant not awarded a slot in the first round, you look at their 2d choices and repeat the process. For those still not awarded a slot, you then look at their 3d choices, then the 4th & c &c until you’ve awarded as many slots as you can with this round of bidding. You then open up a 2d round of bidding to attempt to fill any empty slots. In this hypothetical county, you’ll have 3,500 scheduled slots to fill.
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You also have to provide for contingent shifts, the purpose of which would be to execute recounts or to execute subsequent rounds of tabulation in ranked-choice contests. You might have three shifts on Sunday, three on Monday, and so forth. You award people their bid if the shift actually takes place and 20% of their bid if the shift does not take place.
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The prevalence of meal delivery services nowadays should allow for meal orders which can be billed to the board of elections. Republicans in particular might benefit from securing shuttle services to transport their people two and from slum precincts. In your hypothetical metropolitan country of 144 precincts, about two dozen precincts are likely to have a security issue (and very few enrolled Republicans).