'BradCast' 10/31/2025 (Encore: Republican Partisan Buys Dominion Voting Systems, with election security expert Susan Greenhalgh)

Today's broadcast was originally recorded on October 22nd, 2025. Dominion voting systems announced the company was sold and rebranded as Liberty Vote. So we currently do have Dominion voting systems. Nothing in the system has changed. It's still the same equipment. The name has changed. Oh, well, that's all. The name has changed. Everything else is still the same. Why worry? as I follow my From Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, this is the broadcast. As heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA, and on dozens of other fine affiliate stations on both the airwaves, the public airwaves, and the internets around the country and the world. Blanketing Planet Earth. I'm Brad Friedman, your friendly investigative blogger, journalist, troublemaker, muckraker, and all around, swell fellow, says me. from bradblog.com. Thank you for joining us for another thrilling edition of the Bradcast. And yes, it came as a pretty big surprise last week, pretty much out of the blue. Or maybe out of the red, as the case may be, Desi Doyan, I don't know. Is that a way to put it? How are you? There's definitely a way to put it. It sort of, well, it was a surprise in any event when it was announced that a brand new company named Liberty Vote had purchased the nation's second largest voting system vendor, dominion voting systems had purchased it lock, stock, and barrel, apparently for an undisclosed price. Now, you... probably recalled Dominion, if nothing else, for being the main voting system that company that Donald Trump and has supporters. falsely claimed, without evidence, had somehow rigged machines, voting machines and counting machines in 2020 to steal the election for Joe Biden from Donald Trump, who to this day, still with zero evidence, claims that the election was stolen from him. For those of us longtime election integrity advocates who follows such things very closely, well, I got to say, this sale... really did come straight out of the blue last week. And for some, it has been especially troubling, given that the supposedly sole owner of Liberty Vote is a guy named Scott Leindecker, who previously served as the Republican election director in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, where he was hired at the time by a guy named Ed Martin.

who headed the city's election commission at the time. Well, if that name sounds familiar to you, Ed Martin is now one of Trump's chief partisan operatives at the Department of Justice. He is, for instance, the guy who put together the ridiculous charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. He's in charge of all of the pardons that are now happening at the White House and DOJ, including, I assume, George Santos's pardon. Oh, yeah. Last week. Martin is so partisan. that even Republicans in the U.S. Senate refused to confirm his appointment as Trump's U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. So they had to find about two or three other jobs for Martin to do. So Ed Martin, that's the guy who hired Scott Lindecker as the Republican Director of Elections in St. Louis. And since then, Lindecker has gone on to create a company named No Inc. An election technology company, as they call themselves. It has become the nation's largest supplier of electronic poll books. Lindecker will now own both no ink, that company, and the nation's second largest voting machine company. Pretty cool, huh? The newly formed company, when announcing the purchase last week, also vowed to follow the executive order that Donald Trump last spring issued seeking sweeping changes to election policies, election policies that are, in fact, unlawful. as Donald Trump would have them changed to, that as multiple judges have put a hold on that executive order for violating the Constitution. And yet, Lindecker and... Liberty Vote said they are going to be following that executive order. So, yeah, for good reason, all of this has concerned a lot of folks from election officials to election transparency and security experts. One such expert who has been following such matters for about two decades now, our friend Susan Greenhall, will join us momentarily to either put us at ease about this purchase or scare the hell out of us. Maybe both. We will see. In the meantime, last night, our friend, Attorney Chris Geidner, of Law Dork News, sent out a late-night edition of his newsletter with exclusive photos declaring, quote, after the Washington Post reported Monday on the demolition of the East Wing facade of the White House, a new picture obtained by Law Dork was taken on Tuesday showing that a substantial portion of the entirety of the East Wing

has now been demolished. With new photographs emerging, it became abundantly clear on Tuesday that Donald Trump's, Donald Trump had ordered the demolition of the entire east wing of the White House to make room for construction of what TPM's David Kurtz describes as his ill-fitting gaudy ballroom. Aaron Reiklin Melnick, the senior fellow at the American Immigration Council tweeted, quote, it would appear that he's tearing down the entire East Wing without any congressional oversight or legal approval, even though he doesn't own the building and is using reportedly private money for the entire thing, not government funding. Quote, they're wrecking it, political scientist and professor emeritus at Towson University, Martha Joint Kumar, told the Washington Post, and these are changes that can't be undone. They are destroying that history forever. Of course, all of that... Also comes as a surprise to many because while the White House had announced the construction of a ballroom over the summer, supposedly funded by private money, itself, by the way, unlawful for government buildings, but they made this announcement earlier in the summer, and at the time, Donald Trump explained it this way. It'll be built over on the east side. And it will be beautiful. It'll be views of the Washington Monument. It won't interfere with the current building. I won't be. It'll be near it, but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I'm the biggest fan of. It's my favorite. Yeah, well, turns out, and I hope you're sitting down for this, but it turns out Donald Trump lied. I know. Weird, right? This afternoon, the New York Times, and a number of other outlets confirmed, in fact, what Gidner and others were yelling and screaming about on Tuesday night. The entire West Wing of the White House is, in fact, East Wing, thank you. Give them time. But for now, the East Wing of the White House is, in fact, being demolished despite what Trump said in early. July, in late July, actually. As NBC reports late today, the entire East Wing of the White House will be demolished, quote, within days. That, according to two Trump administration officials, the demolition is a significant expansion. of the ballroom construction project from what President Donald Trump said this summer when he said it won't interfere with the current building and that it'll be near it but not touching it and that it pays total respect to the existing building which he lets us know he is the biggest fan of so big in fact that he is demolishing about one-third of it without permission from anyone but himself

A White House official told NBC News the, quote, entirety of the East Wing would eventually be, quote, modernized and rebuilt. That's what they call demolition. While acknowledging that the process is fluid, quote, the scope and size of the ballroom project have always been subject to vary as the process develops the official told NBC News. In other words, they're making it up as they go along. Donald Trump is making it up as they go along and none of the official bodies who are supposed to approve of such changes to the White House before they happen. have given their approval here. Construction on the ballroom began last month. Trump has said it will hold up to 900 people. And last week, he said the total price would be about $250 million, if you believe them. Well, today he actually upped that. So I guess inflation is getting worse. It's higher again? Today in the Oval Office, he said it'll be $300 million. Oh, now we're up to $300. Okay. Because I had some math here. As we noted yesterday, Trump is now demanding the Justice Department agree to give him $200. $30 million taxpayer dollars to just give it to him right now by way of a settlement for having investigated him for the crimes that he committed in years past. But don't worry, someone before that happened, someone at the Justice Department would have to agree to that settlement according to DOJ guidelines. And that person happens to be the Deputy Attorney General who happens to be Trump's lead. personal criminal defense attorney Todd Blanche. So I wonder if he'll approve that settlement. So anyway, that's 230 million of the supposed 250 million, at least before today, that it would cost to build this ballroom. And beyond that, who are these private donors? Well, as NBC reports, Comcast Corporation, the parent company of NBC Universal, was included on a list of top donors. published by the White House, though it was unclear how much Comcast and other donors had contributed. Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, agreed last month to donate $22 million to the project in a settlement of a ridiculous court case that Trump had brought against the online video platform. So $230 million in taxpayer dollars stolen by, I'm sorry, given to Donald Trump, $22 million from YouTube. Well, there's your $250 million. there. But, you know, Trump is still going to get a bunch of money from others so that he can pocket a bunch of that on his own, which is, I guess, why the price is now up to $300 million pretend dollars at this point. Who's overseeing all of this spending to make sure he doesn't pocket it? Well, you guessed it, nobody. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit agency created by Congress to help preserve historic buildings.

warned administration officials in a letter on Tuesday that the planned ballroom quote will overwhelm the White House itself. We respectfully urge the administration and the National Park Service to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review process. That according to Carol Quillan, the National Trust's CEO in a statement. But the White House argues that it hasn't been required to submit plans for review by the National Capital Planning Commission because only demolition and not technically construction has begun. Smart. You see, you tear it down first, and then they'll have to approve whatever your plans are for rebuilding it, right? The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Planning Commission, and D.C. State Historic Preservation offices are the regulatory agencies that would traditionally be involved in greenlighting any major renovations at the White House, but not under King Donald. The trust for the National Mall oversees the private donations given to support the Ballroom Project as the non-profit partner of the National Park Service, but will they be allowed to actually track where all of this money has come from and where all of it actually goes to, or will the president break the law by, you know, not sharing that information with them? The Supreme Court last year, after all, said that he is allowed to break any law that he wants to. So why would he share that information with him? Especially if he's pocketing a bunch of it. But that's now legal, apparently, according to the Supreme Court. Brian Clark Green, an architectural historian, a former appointee to the National Capital Planning Commission, said in an interview quote, from a norms and customs side, administrations have always gone through that approval process. to get buy-in and to make sure that the public sees the process and isn't surprised by the design. The whole point of the review process is to improve the design. So you had the Trump statement over the summer, he notes, that this will not affect the East Wing at all, but obviously it is. A public process would have avoided that kind of shock and surprise. Construction plans were not submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission in advance, but a White House official claimed they will be, quote, soon when it is time. Feel better, Des, soon when it is time. Absolutely not. It's unclear what that time frame is. The White House, of course, called the uproar about all of this manufactured outrage.

by, quote, unhinged leftists and their fake news allies. The critics, the White House said, were clutching their pearls over President Trump's visionary edition of a grand privately funded ballroom to the White House. So, Desdy Doyen. You are one of those unhinged leftists who's been clutching your pearls all week over this as the photos have been coming in from the demolition. Why have you been really? You have been quite troubled by this, it seems. I do find it very troubling. I mean, it's, you know, the White House belongs to the people of the United States. It is not Trump's personal residence to do with whatever he pleases. And as you've noted, there are many laws that have to be followed. Oh, laws. What can be done to it. You are darling. He is desecrating a symbol of democracy and he is turning it into a tacky. eyesore. I mean, if you look at the design of this ballroom, you know those crabs where one crab in the ocean has has a one giant claw and then the rest of it is pretty tiny? That's what this kind of looks like. It totally unbalances the classical architecture of the White House. And it's a metaphor. I think it's a metaphor for what Trump is doing to America. He is demolishing it. But there is a bit of good news. I did see someone on social media say that if the Trumpers are going to claim that Trump has the right to demolish parts of the White House whenever he wants. The law doesn't apply. Then that also means that the next Democratic president in the White House can then therefore turn around and demolish what Trump has put into place. Yeah, but see, Democrats don't do that. On the other hand, maybe they'll turn them into office space, which is greatly needed, as I understand it, at the White House. I'll tell you the thing that jumped out at me, and we've got to get to a break, Susan standing by. But if I was John Deere, or the Caterpillar company, I would be furious because the first thing that jumped out at me was this great big back host seen in the photos tearing down the east wing of the White House. It had a great big Volvo logo on it. Yep. Which Volvo is a Swedish company, by the way, now owned by a Chinese multinational conglomerate. So America First. The White House could not even find a firm with American-made demolition equipment to tear down the White House. I swear to God, I cannot believe there are any Republicans or Magas out there still supporting this dope. But I guess brain poisoning is a difficult thing to break. All right. Speaking of America first, there is now a new supposedly... American-owned company running elections in 27 states, a company that did not even exist before last week and is owned, we are told, by a longtime Republican partisan Trump ally. That full story and whether it's one more thing to be worried about before next year's critical 2026 midterm elections when Donald Trump could lose his control of Congress.

Or whether there's nothing to worry about here, everything's fine. Well, we will discuss that next with Susan Greenhall of Free Speech for People, who knows a whole lot about all of this. That is straight ahead on the broadcast. I'm Brad Friedman. Hey, this is Bradd, here at the Bradcast and Bradblog.com, we fight for election integrity all year around, like no other media outlet in the nation. But, of course, we need your help to help us remain on your public airwaves and completely independent. Please help us continue that fight over your public airwaves by stopping by Bradblog.com slash donate. And thanks. You're listening to an encore presentation of the Bradcast. You can count on me like one, two, three, I'll be there. And I know when I need it, I can count on you. Welcome back. It's the Bradcast, Bradfiedman from brandblog.com. The sale of Dominion voting systems, the election technology company that Donald Trump allies aggressively targeted with false claims about the 2020 election. took state and local election officials by surprise last week. It was also a bit of seemingly out-of-nowhere stunner for those of us election integrity advocates who have been following and reporting on the industry for decades now. All of a sudden, someone has bought Dominion voting systems. An announcement from the new owner, which calls itself Liberty. voting, led by former St. Louis, Missouri Republican election official, Scott Lyondekker, describes the, describe the acquisition as, quote, a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America, unquote. For now, as vote beats Jessica Hussman is reporting it, the sale appears to be more of a rebranding than a revolution, she says. Dominion is simply operating under the name of its new owner, called Liberty Vote, she argues. State election officials say they have now been told no staff changes, contract terminations, or product overhauls are expected. Quote, The clerks were very upset about this, said Matt Crane, director of the Colorado Clerks Association, a state with a lot of dominion voting systems. He organized a call between Lindecker and the state's many election officials to address their concerns, but came away telling vote, beat quote, once we took a step back and took a deep breath, we realized not much was changing.

The call assuaged their worries, apparently, leaving clerks cautiously optimistic. Quote, he's saying all the right things, Crane said. Many customers, as she notes, the customers in this case being the jurisdictions who purchase or lease Dominion voting systems, now Liberty's hardware and software equipment and services, were informed by their existing support staff at Dominion about the sale that support staff will continue to provide service under the new name. A Liberty Vote official said, quote, with respect to staffing and contracting, there are no plans for any changes at this time. has been involved in elections for a very long time, a former Republican election director in St. Louis, initially hired by a guy named Ed Martin, who ran St. Louis elections at the time. You may know the name Ed Martin, as he is one of the most partisan operatives, now working in Donald Trump's Department of Justice. But Lindecker... founded the company called No Inc. back in 2011. Now, if you've heard that name, it may be due to the fact that the electronic poll book company, No Inc, has had systems at the center of polling place check-in problems and bottlenecks over the years since developing and deploying their iPad-like voter check-in device in more than a dozen states. No Inc. has since become the nation's most widely used vendor for electronic poll books. Liberty Vote is a separate company that Linedecker created apparently to acquire Dominion, though the funding of that company for the moment anyway appears less than clear. Lindecker told clerks in Colorado, according to Votebeat, that he is the sole owner and representative. And he told a representative told Wired magazine that Lindecker privately financed the acquisition. Okay, I guess that means with his own money. Or with someone else's? I believe that's unclear, but we'll see if my guest joining me momentarily has any more information along those lines. Liberty Votes' surprise announcement last week said its goal was to, quote, restore public confidence in the electoral process through transparent, secure, and trustworthy voting systems, including the use of hand-marked paper ballots. Well, that sounds good. As longtime Bradcast listeners and Bradblog.com readers likely know by now, handmarked paper ballots as opposed to ballots marked via touchscreen-like computer devices that might print out a computer-marked paper ballot. Those hand-marked paper ballots are the only type of ballots that can, in fact, be known after an election to actually reflect the intent of the voter. So that sounds good. Following an endless stream of lies by Donald Trump and his supporters in his friendly far-right media outlets like Fox, Newsmax, OAN, et cetera, falsely claiming without any evidence even five years later.

that Dominion's voting systems stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Dominion has spent years seeking to clear its name through the court system. In 2023, it settled a defamation lawsuit famously against Fox News. Just moments before the trial was to begin, the settlement was for some $787 million that Fox was to pay Dominion, more than three quarters of a billion dollars. after accusing the network of knowingly broadcasting false claims that Dominion had rigged the 2020 election for Joe Biden. In recent weeks, Dominion also reportedly reached undisclosed settlements with former Trump attorneys Sidney Jerome Powell and Rudy Giuliani in separate defamation cases in which the company had sued them. The settlement of those suits was reportedly a condition of the purchase of domain by Liberty. Despite multiple legal victories by Dominion in the years since 2020, even election officials who never believed the conspiracy theories found it politically difficult to contract with the company that was so publicly vilified, leading a number of counties like Shasta here in California and Rio Grande County in Colorado to either cancel or rescind contracts with the company. Four county clerks told Votebeat that they declined to even consider bids from Dominion because they were concerned about potential blowback from Trump supporters. But Liberty? Well, I guess that's a whole new company and a whole new ballgame, right? Quote, honestly, I'm just excited not to talk about Dominion every day anymore, said the press spokesman for Georgia's Secretary of State's office. If this helps us move on, great. The Secretary of State in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, has long ordered every single county in the critical battleground state to use Dominion's unverifiable touchscreen systems, despite proven vulnerabilities in those systems and the fact that it's impossible after an election to know if even one vote cast on them actually reflects the intent of any voter. That is not a problem with Dominion's touchscreen systems, by the way. It's a problem with all such systems that rely on computers rather than humans to mark selections on paper ballots. The takeaway from Hussman's reporting at Votebeat is that at least some election officials may already be feeling comfortable about the new partisan Republican ownership of the company that they've otherwise worked with for years. But a number of election integrity advocates that I've worked with for years, real ones, by the way, not the MAGA folks who suddenly pretend to be election integrity advocates. Those folks have been somewhat less sanguine about whatever is going on here with this purchase of Dominion, or they are at least both curious and skeptical about the announcement, which in truth did sort of come out of nowhere last week.

As the excellent longtime voting system technology reporter Kim Zetter noted at Wired last week, the news that Dominion Voting Systems was purchased by the founder and CEO of No Inc, a Missouri-based maker of e-pull books, has left election integrity advocates confused over what? If anything, this could mean for voters and the integrity of U.S. elections. The Liberty Press release, Zetter observed, said that the rebranded company will be 100% American-owned. That it will have a, quote, paper ballot focus. It will, quote, prioritize facilitating third-party auditing and is committed to domestic staffing and software development. Dominion, the second largest provider of voting machines in the country whose systems are used in 27 states, including the entire state of Georgia, as mentioned, has developed its software in the past in Canada and Belgrade, Serbia. They've done so for two decades. The Liberty Statement does not say whether the company plans to rewrite. code that was developed by those foreign workers, which would potentially require rewriting hundreds of thousands of lines of code, or whether the company will move foreign developers here to the U.S. or replace them with Americans. A Liberty official who agreed to speak on condition that they not be named, well, how's that for transparency from the new company? Too cynical? That official told Wired, Only that Lindecker quote is committed 100% to domestic staffing and software development. An unnamed source told CNN, however, that Liberty will continue to have a presence in Canada, where its machines are used across that country. Our friend Philip Stark, professor of statistics at UC Berkeley and a longtime election integrity advocate, told Zetter at Wired that Liberty's assurance about domestic only workers is a bit of a red herring. Quote, if the claim is that this is somehow a security measure, it isn't because programmers based in the U.S. also may be interested in undermining or altering election integrity. With regard to the third-party audits mentioned in the press release, a Liberty official told Wired that that means the company will conduct a third-party top-to-bottom independent review of Dominion's software and equipment in a timely manner and will work closely with federal and state certification agencies and report any vulnerabilities, okay? But to whom will they be reporting those vulnerabilities to the public? That they will be doing in order to give voters assurance in the machines and the results they produce, but the company did not say when this review would occur, but a Liberty representative told Axios that it would happen ahead of next year's midterm elections, and the company would quote, rebuild or retire machines as needed. Okay.

Is that before or after next year's critical midterm elections then? Because even if vulnerabilities in Dominion systems are reported, and we already know there are a lot of them based on our friend Marilyn Marx's lawsuit and trial against the Secretary of State of Georgia last year, revealing that Dominion touchscreen ballot marking devices used in every precinct in Georgia, for example, can be hacked by any voter at the polling place with little more than a ballpoint pen. Even if, perhaps I should say, when vulnerabilities are found and if they are publicly reported by Dominion's new owner Liberty, it would seem impossible for new systems to be built and certified by federal and state testers for use in next year's midterm elections. So do the folks at Liberty even know what they're saying when they're claiming as much? Stark and other election experts told Wired that they believe that this timeline is unrealistic and appears to be aimed just at making the company look good to right-wing credits. What's more, Stark, who developed procedures for risk limiting audits in some jurisdictions to verify the integrity of election results says the only audits that can provide assurances about election outcomes are post-election audits of hand-marked paper ballots. An audit of voting software can't even provide assurance that a voting machine has not been subverted because the software and machine configurations can be altered after those audits. A software audit can only identify existing vulnerabilities, but many of these have already been identified by third-party computer security experts who examined dominion code in the past, as they did for that trial in Georgia. And if Liberty were to rewrite any dominion code, it would need to be audited for new vulnerabilities introduced by the recoding before they were used in an election. Writing over at Slate on Tuesday, longtime election security champion and friend of this show, Susan Greenhall of Free Speech for People, said that the announcement that the second largest U.S. voting system vendor would be in the hands of a self-declared partisan sparked concerns and speculation on blogs and social media. Should a former Republican official be charged with providing and programming the voting machines to count more than a quarter of all U.S. ballots? As someone who has studied election systems in the election industry for 20 years, Greenhall writes, I've gotten questions from family and friends wanting to know if this is something to be worried about. My response, she says, has been, well, not particularly. But not because it's not wildly inappropriate and troubling for a declared partisan to control voting equipment. It's because the partisan ownership of an election supplier is merely one aspect of a badly broken, opaque, and corrupted election system that we've been subjected to for...

decades. Here to explain both the wildly inappropriate new partisan ownership of the nation's second largest voting technology vendor and the badly broken, opaque and corrupted election system industry that we have been subjected to for decades is our friend Susan Greenhall, longtime election integrity and transparency expert and senior advisor on election security at free speech for people.org. Oh, Susan Greenhall. Welcome back to the Bradcast. This is a surprise. Hey, Brad. Yeah, I didn't have that on my bingo card. No, I did not either. First, do we have any idea, Susan? I got a lot of questions for you. And I know that you may or may not be able to answer some of them because this is also new. And there's a lot of us sort of trying to scramble to figure it all out. But do we have any idea? Who is actually behind Liberty's purchase of Dominion? Is it really this one guy, Scott Leindecker, the former Republican election director in Missouri, an owner of an e-poll book company? Or is there evidence that the money for this pretty major purchase by, yes, a Trump ally is actually coming from somewhere else? I have not seen or heard of any evidence that the money is coming from somewhere else. All we have are these public statements that have been made by Liberty Vote or by Mr. Limedecker himself. But first of all, there's no law against lying in a press release. It wouldn't be the first time somebody's not been truthful in a press release if that isn't, if it's misleading or in some way. There's nothing to hold him to account for that. And moreover, this is the way business has been done for very long time in the election industry is that we don't know who actually has the money behind the ownership of these companies. That was the status with Dominion. So we had no idea who was actually financing the ownership of Dominion. We have no idea. who is financing the ownership of ES&S, the largest voting system vendor or Hart InterCific, the third largest voting system vendor, because they are all... principally owned by private equity firms. And they don't have to disclose their ownership if they don't want to. Now, Congress could mandate, right, that voting system ownership be fully public information. And in fact, as you reported Slate, at one point, Congress did try to shake, at least shake that information out of these companies during a congressional hearing in the past. I don't know how successful they were, but they could pass a law to mandate that. couldn't they? Absolutely. Congress could do that. I don't see our entirely dysfunctional Congress doing anything that would be that productive anytime soon. But that is something that they could do. As they wrote in the slate piece, there have been some sort of anemic...

attempts to ask the vendors who's financing them in the past. But there hasn't been much follow-up, and the vendors essentially defied Congress and said, we're not going to tell you, and you can't make us. So we know that there was a hearing that was held in the House, the members of the Senate. wrote letters to try to investigate this and they didn't get anywhere. But there's other mechanisms that there's other places where pressure could be exerted on the vendors to demand more transparency. Every time a contract is entered into, whether it's at the state or county level, there are election officials who are negotiating these contracts can put in clauses that require disclosure of the... principal financiers for the company. So that's something that my local county board of elections could do tomorrow if they had the will and the wherewithal to do that. And so could the states, they could put in requirements as well. And moreover, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which runs the federal certification testing and certification program, which is not a mandated program, it is a voluntary program. Not all of the states opt into it. States can opt into it. They do opt into it to varying degrees. But it's a very powerful market driver. All of the major vendors have their systems certified by the Federal U.S. Election Assistance Commission. So if there was a prerequisite that you can't enter into this program unless you make public your ownership and your investors, that would give us a whole lot of transparency in a flash. That would. Yeah, that certainly would, although, to be honest, I can't see EAC doing it. They have been, the Election Assistance Commission has historically also been very close with the vendors. It still feels like if that were to be required, it would have to come from a congressional mandate of some sort. But before we move on from that, Susan, it seems to me like this is something, ownership of these companies that, frankly, both Republicans and Democrats, might even be able to agree on at this point. I know for years it was Democrats who wanted this information. Republicans wanted to have nothing to do with it. Now Republicans are suddenly interested in who is running the voting system, companies, and so forth. It seems like this is one point that they really ought to be able to agree on, even in our dysfunctional Congress, no? I would... I would hope so. I've been waiting for that day because it's so logical. Maybe that's why Congress can't get there. I don't, I 100% agree with you. And I also want to just be clear, I agree with you, too, that the EAC is far too dysfunctional. I just wanted to make the point that there is a very available lever there that could be extremely effective. But that goes to the larger problem that.

I wanted to highlight as well, which is that there is this very close, cozy relationship we have between the people that should be regulating the vendors in the form of the election officials and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. And that's basically we have agency capture, and then therefore the vendors get to, you know. Walk all over them basically if they want to. Yep. And I will also note, if I am not mistaken, here in California, I believe that the state requires voting system companies to actually disclose their ownership. I don't know if it gets disclosed publicly or if it's one of those things that kept in the vault with the source code of their systems. I think some people are looking into that, maybe making public records requests to try to get that, shake that in. information out of California. If, in fact, the state has it, I would think they would. If the sale has actually gone through, has finalized, I think that information will need to come to California. How much of it will, you know, remain behind a private equity fund where the names aren't mentioned. Well, that remains to be seen. But. I mentioned that your friend and mine, Philip Stark, of UC Berkeley, says that concerns about foreign ownership, as mentioned by the Liberty Vote press release, this will be 100% America owned and written by Americans and everything else, the software, that's a bit of a red herring since U.S. software developers can also rig election software if they want to. What is your feeling on that? Well, I think Philip is absolutely right, that it's a red herring. I do think that removing it even further from the U.S. can only be worse, but to think that by... by keeping the programming and the running of the systems in the U.S., that that somehow is going to ensure greater security overall is very misguided and ill-conceived and kind of ignoring human nature as well as historical precedent of what we have in our elections here. It kind of reminds me of something that we have heard for years from election officials and others. You don't have to worry about this. Our software is secure. Our machines are secure. No one has access to them other than election officials, which, okay, that's nice. But why should we trust election officials either with, you know, access to these systems? Well, exactly right, especially because there's, you know, Brad, you and I have talked about at length on other shows, the concerns about.

election officials allowing Trump allies and Trump operatives access to voting machines, which is well documented. It's not up for debate or dispute. Nobody's disputed it. We know it's a fact. It's happened. It's been documented in records in court cases. So to think that just because election officials are the only ones that have access to the systems is going to somehow ensure security or that the vendors themselves are going to be. able to ensure security that it's just just very There is a phrase for that security by obscurity, which computer experts will tell you never works. Kim's, Kim Zetter's piece over at Wired reports that Liberty claims they will conduct a, quote, third party top to bottom independent review of Dominion software and equipment in a timely manner and will work closely with federal and state certification agencies and report any vulnerabilities in order to give voters assurances in the machines and the results that they produce, which brings a few questions to my mind that I would love your thoughts on Susan Greenhall. First, who will they be reporting these vulnerabilities to, to the public, to the counties, to the Election Assistance Commission? Because we already know... Thanks to Marilyn Mark's lawsuit against Georgia's voting system that these systems made by Dominion are rife with vulnerabilities. So, you know, will those vulnerabilities be reported publicly? And if so, do they believe that reporting those vulnerabilities publicly will, as they say, give voters assurance in the machines and the results that they produce? As you see, thoughts on that? I've got follow-ups, but your thoughts on that for the moment. Yeah, that whole plan didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me. Yes, reporting to who is a huge question. They think that they're going to be able to do this sort of security review, make changes to the system to address anything that they find, and then have it recertified in time. Then they would have to have any changes made to the system that could include physical changes to the actual hardware as well as software changes made to the system, have that go through the testing and certification process, which takes months, if not years. Yes. And then deploy the new systems to the election jurisdictions before the 2026 election. It's completely impossible. It's entirely a fantasy. So this. I mean, it's a little confusing to me because Scott Londecker has worked in elections, he knows better than to make a claim like that because it's just not credible or possible at this point.

And the reporting of the vulnerabilities is strange to me as well because when Maryland's, the computer security experts that were working in Maryland's lawsuit, Drew Springall and Alex Holderman, documented significant and severe security vulnerabilities with the Dominion touchscreen voting machines at use in Georgia. They reported those vulnerabilities to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and to the Department of Homeland Security. And the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's response was... Well, this doesn't actually violate any of our certification standards. So thank you for the information. We are doing nothing with it. And the system remains certified by the federal government in good standing despite these known vulnerabilities. And despite the cybersecurity infrastructure security agency, federal agency. Looking at those vulnerabilities and telling people who use dominion systems that they need to patch their software to at least try to take care of some of them. And yet the state of Georgia, the entire state of Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger there said, nope, we're not going to change a thing. We are going to keep them. As is. So, I mean, even if this company, this new, the new Dominion owners want to change our upgrade software, there's no guarantee that the states will bother to play along, even if it were possible to get them done before next year's midterms. And frankly, there isn't. No. And I worry, Susan, about the fact that they're even saying as much. Is it because Lindecker does not understand how the voting systems work and those processes work? Or are they just willing to say stuff to try to make someone happy by saying stuff that is completely not doable? Yeah, it sounds a little bit to me like it's the latter, maybe a lot, that it's the latter, that it is putting out talking points that that are meant to give certain thoughts and feels to the people that hear them, not so much to actually become, to go into action in a meaningful way. That's definitely a concern, which raises the other concerns about what the ownership situation really is because.

People put a lot of stuff in press releases. Yeah. And the partisan nature of it as well. What are your concerns, Susan, about essentially one single company here, or at least two companies, no ink and liberty, but both being owned and run by the same person. What are your concerns about basically one person running both electronic poll books and voting systems at the same? precinct, as is the case in many places. Should we see that as a security concern with that sort of a setup with such control of elections by one single entity for both, you know, signing in voters with the poll books and the voter registration files and the election data itself, the voting data? Well, you can see how that creates a greater threat of a single point of failure for to have one vendor in charge of both of those sections of the voting process. And that said, it's already going on right now because ESNS makes their own poll books and they sell their own. and they integrate them with their voting systems. And we have seen instances where they don't operate correctly, and then there's a problem. So this is another case of... Yeah, that's worrying, but, you know, it's already happening. Right. And I, there's some other concerns, though, specifically with these two vendors merging that data because there are people in Georgia that you've mentioned, Maryland, as well as the experts, Alex Holderman, have identified certain ballot privacy issues with the Dominion scanners, not as much the touchscreens, but that. If you can get access to the cast vote records, there's ways to decipher the order of the people that showed up to vote. And if you then have access to the electronic poll books to see who came in at what time to vote, you might be able to figure out how everybody voted because the cast vote records are made public in Georgia. So this... amplifies the ballot secrecy issues that have been identified with the Dominion system that once again there is a patch for that that Brad Raffensperger has said patches we don't need no stinking patches we're just going to keep using our you know our known known or system with known flaws and acute issues and use it anyway. So, and by the way, best of luck to him, I understand that Brad Raffensperger is running for governor of Georgia next year on these very same systems. So I hope that all works out well for him.

If I'm understanding your takeaway, I got just a minute or two here, you're concerned, obviously, about the partisan nature of Liberty's purchase of Dominion, but really no more so than previous opaque ownerships of these companies. Is that sort of a correct characterization of your take in Slate this week? I'd say yes, but I'd go a step further. I would say that we have already been running our elections with people that have partisan affiliations and ties. The people that own the systems and run the companies having partisan affiliations and ties. And we don't know, like I said, we didn't know who really was behind Dominion before, but we do know that ESNS was founded by people with partisan affiliations and has been heavily invested by people with partisan affiliations. So it's just now another one that we know for sure. Is that, is that? Yeah. Yeah, no, it does. And it's, and it kind of brings me back to something that I've sort of been. A point that I've been trying to make for, oh, I don't know, 20 years or so, which is that everyone is partisan. Even if they say they are not partisan, A, they may be actual partisans or they will be accused of being partisans. This notion that there is some perfect, you know, professional world of election officials or voting system vendors that is, you know, 100% bipartisan or nonpartisan or whatever, that does not exist. That will never exist, it seems to me. Therefore, what we need to do. is have a voting system that is 100% transparent, overseable by the public. So that the worst person in the world, I used to refer to the back in 2004, I remember Jay Kenneth Blackwell, this terrible right winger who was the Secretary of State of Ohio. We need a voting system that Jay Kenneth Blackwell can run and that... we, the public, can still have confidence in because we have oversight. We're never going to find nonpartisan people, or if they are, we're not going to believe that they're nonpartisan, so we need a system that is so transparent, beginning with handmarked paper ballots, so that the worst person in the world can run it. Do you share that thinking? Yes, a thousand percent, and I... I was going to reference the quote, which I don't, I'm not sure who originated, who started it, but who's the person who said, like, we need a system that the devil himself can run, which is essentially what you're saying. I just heard Doug Jones saying it again. The solution is not.

radical, more transparency with the voting system vendors just so that we know how partisan, exactly how partisan they are. Although we should know that. We should be entitled to know that. But it should be a system that is so transparent and so auditable and that is audited in a trustworthy and public way that we can trust the election results. at the end of the day, no matter who's running it. And that is the solution that we need to be going to. And I had thought of trying to incorporate that into the piece that I wrote for Slate. It would have just made it twice as long. So I kept that out of it. But our dear friend Marilyn said she was going to write a follow-up and include that as the... So we can look forward to that. Good. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I noticed on Liberty's website, basically, they've wiped out the Dominion voting website. I think it just doesn't exist anymore. Last I checked at Liberty, I think it's Libertyvote.org or something or dot com. There's a one page, picture of the Washington Monument, very patriotic, and talks about restoring faith in our voting systems. We do not need faith. in our voting systems. We need faith in our churches and synagogues and mosques, perhaps, but not in our voting systems. There, we need oversight to gain confidence in the election. Faith has nothing to do with it, at least in my opinion. Anyway, Susan, great work. Thank you so much for that piece over at Slate. I think it speaks to a lot of concerns that folks have been having over the past week since we heard this news. I will, of course, link to it, the headline at Slate. Trump's most reviled voting company sold to a GOP official. That's not the worst of it. We will link you over there. Susan Greenhall is a longtime election integrity champion. She is now the senior advisor on election security at free speech for people.org. And you can find her on the social medias over at Blue Sky at Susan Greenhall. Always great speaking with you, Susan. Thank you for helping us begin. to wrap our brains around this one. Thank you. My pleasure. All right, we've got to get out. Liberty Biberty. My thanks to Desi Doy and our producer and all of you for spending a portion of your day or night with us. If you missed any portion of today's show, download it anytime for free at bradblog.com. Those of you who hit a donate button there make it possible for the entire world to download our shows for free. Thank you for that. You can also go straight to bradblog.com slash donate. Drop me email if you like. I am Bradcast at Bradblog. And on the social media's especially blue sky, you will find me at the Brad blog. We will see you there until we see you here again next time. I'm Brad Friedman. Good luck world.

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