America's Voting Software: Written by Criminals, Backed by Corporations
An investigative report into the tale of prison records, proprietary code, and a democracy built on NDAs.
In America, you can serve time for computer fraud and come back to write the software that decides elections. That’s not a joke. That’s our reality and it’s been happening for decades.
In 2002, Diebold, a voting machine vendor, bought a company called Global Election Systems (GES). GES had a programmer named Jeffrey Dean. A man fresh out of prison for manipulating computer systems to embezzle money.
Diebold didn’t think twice about bringing him onboard. In fact, they promoted him. Made him head of their Research and Development department. Where he wrote the code for the voting machines.
As of 2025, ES&S controls between 50 and 55 percent of all voting machines in the U.S & Dominion holds roughly 30 percent. Hart InterCivic covers the remaining 10 to 15 percent. These are estimates because somehow, in a democracy, no one’s required to keep a public count.
And it wasn’t just Dean. Another convicted embezzler, John Elder, was running ballot printing operations. Their names might be gone from the company letterhead, but their work stayed buried in the firmware. We don’t know if these men went to Dominion & ES&S when they gobbled up Premier (rebranded Diebold). But we know their code did.
So, just know that the code running your county’s voting machines? It may still carry the fingerprints of convicted felons who once went to prison for embezzlement. But don’t worry they’d never steal from the American people, right?
The truth is no one cleaned the mess up. No one checked. We trusted the vendors. The vendors trusted the criminals. And the government trusted everyone to shut up and stop asking questions.
Oh, and the best part? The code is proprietary. So maybe it's still in there. Maybe it’s not. No one’s allowed to look. The courts have repeatedly affirmed that corporate secrets are more important than your right to a fair and free election.
Convicted felons can’t vote but they can build our voting machines, write the software that decides elections, and create the systems that print the ballots themselves. And now? We even have a convicted felon serving as President of the United States.
So, how did we get here?
In the late ’90s and early 2000s, the vultures moved in. Big companies started buying up the small ones. Legacy systems were duct-taped into new ones. Code was traded and divided up and when the dust settled, just three companies ran nearly every voting machine in the country.
Enter Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia: the original Big Three.
They didn’t just sell the machines. They owned the software and the service contracts. All of it.
Behind the curtain? Private equity firms, defense contractors, and political fixers who understood one simple rule: control the machines, and you control the outcome.
They didn’t win the market with innovation. They won it with legislation.
Oh, Diebold and Sequoia? They eventually got gobbled up, too, by ES&S and Dominion, the two largest voting machine vendors in the United States today.
So, let me take you back 25 years ago, to the Florida recount debacle.
In the 2000 presidential election, the vote in Florida was so close it triggered a recount. But problems with confusing ballots and badly designed voting machines caused chaos, and the Supreme Court stopped the recount, making George W. Bush the winner.
That fared over well, huh?
After that? The country was desperate for election stability. The public lost trust in the elections, and confidence crumbled. It laid the foundation, and from that chaos came the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA).
A gift worth billions given to the rich voting machine vendors who’d been gobbling up smaller companies like Thanksgiving dinner waiting for this moment.
On paper, HAVA was supposed to modernize elections and prevent another Florida-style fiasco. In practice, it was a gold rush.
The law gave states federal money to replace outdated systems with shiny new machines but didn’t require transparency, public oversight, or even paper ballots. It opened the floodgates, and the corporate vendors stampeded through.
That’s exactly why the HAVA Act, sold as reform, was actually a Trojan horse.
It didn’t save democracy. It helped bury it. It just another chapter in the slow-motion corporate coup of the United States and followed with legislation liked Citizens United that allows billionaire-owned corporations to pay for our government officials directly now, instead of through trade groups and dark money alone.
One of the loudest lobby voices in-favor of the HAVA act came from the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a powerful trade group representing Diebold, ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and a lineup of hundreds of tech and defense contractors.
They held private briefings. Flooded Congress with white papers (these slick, authoritative-looking documents that pretend to be policy analysis but are really just glorified sales brochures).
All of this was wrapped up pretty in a bow fear and buzzwords like, “homeland security,” “cyberthreats,” and “critical infrastructure.”
“A terrorist attack on our electoral systems would be a blow to the heart of our democracy.”
— GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell, during a 2002 Senate Rules Committee hearing on election reform.
Their manufactured panic, repeated by senators deep in their pockets, boiled down to this: if you didn’t hand them billions of dollars right then and there, foreign governments were going to steal our elections, and it would be all your fault.
Not-so-fun-fact: The first labs used to certify our voting machines weren’t independent at all they were defense contractors. Ciber, which handled I.T. services for the federal government, quietly rubber-stamped insecure systems while Jack Cobb ran the show.
Wyle, another military contractor, also certified election machines despite specializing in weapons and aerospace testing.
When Ciber got heat, Cobb didn’t go away. He went to Wyle, then launched Pro V&V now one of just two federally approved labs. The same man who helped certify machines by simply rubber stamping what the machine vendors said two decades ago is still certifying them today.
And what’s worse? The system that Cobb and his cronies operate under is barely even a system. There’s no independence or accountability. It’s voluntary.
Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG)
The federal standards for voting machines, Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, are exactly that. Voluntary.
They aren’t law. States aren’t required to follow them. They can ignore them, rewrite them, or bypass them altogether.
Even the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the federal agency supposedly in charge of voting tech, admits it. Let that sink in: there is no mandatory federal standard for voting machines in the United States. None. It varies on a state-to-state basis.
The guidelines are voluntary. States can adopt them, tweak them, or toss them out entirely. Even the EAC’s voting system certification process isn’t mandatory states can, and often do, run their own. The EAC was supposed to be an election watchdog. But what happens when the rules are optional and the referees are just as compromised as the vendors?
It gets worse. The voting machine companies apparently help to write the rules in states where EAC certification IS required. In 2021, during an on-going lawsuit from Free Speech for People, there are allegations that the EAC allowed voting machine company executives to secretly influence the final voting machine “rules” in the latest VVSG (2.0) standards in secret. Done only after public comment had already closed.
Now, for states that do not have any oversight by the EAC? Sure, we’ve got the Help America Vote Act of 2002. But if you think HAVA was written to make our elections more secure, I’ve got a secure Diebold voting machine to sell ya.
HAVA created the EAC. Which time and time again, we find is a corrupted toothless agency that can suggest but not enforce. All this act did was create a blank check, written by vendors, for vendors and it worked, and it continues to work exactly as designed.
They’ve always been about protecting their bottom line, and we’ve seen this repeatedly.
We saw this when Diebold got exposed — when Bev Harris and others revealed their machines were insecure, their code sloppy, their systems vulnerable. They didn’t fix the security flaws. They launched a media PR blitz.
Diebold hired the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), the very same trade group that had lobbied for HAVA on their behalf in the first place.
Suddenly, glossy white papers flooded the Hill. Defense contractors like SAIC rushed to issue statements on how they could fix it. The media strategy was in full swing to make it seem like they really cared about our elections.
Internal documents later showed us their real priorities. Diebold and their allies listed public relations as priority number one.
Election Security? Fifth. Priority #5. Huh ???
Because clearly the problem, to them, was never the machines. It was the public finding out the machines were flawed.
We also saw this when they tried to protect their bottom line:
When John S. Groh, a then-senior VP at ES&S, spoke on behalf of the ITAA and Election Technology Council at a 2006 EAC hearing.
The ETC is a subgroup of the ITAA made up of solely voting machine vendors that ame out the year after the ITAA helped pass the HAVA act.
It was here that he admitted, flat-out, that voting machine vendors and corporate interests were steering the ship.
Then he did what they always do when the heat’s on: blame the voters. Blame the media. Praise the machines.
It was slick, rehearsed, and effective. He needed to shift the blame, kill the criticism, and protect the cash cow. Everyone and anyone was at fault but the machines.
AMERICA — DON’T. LOOK. AT. THE. VOTING. MACHINES. OK?
They couldn’t risk questions back then and they can’t now. That’s why certain people come so hard for work like mine and others like me. Because if the truth gets out, their bottom line burns with it.
Keep that in mind the next time someone tries to sell you an “election integrity” plan. Because the folks selling it? They’re the same ones who sold us this mess in the first place.
They want us looking anywhere but at the machines.
Blame the immigrants. Blame the dead voters. That’s what Donald Palmer and Christy McCormick, the GOP-aligned commissioners in the EAC did.
Just don’t ask about the software. Don’t ask who wrote it. Don’t ask who owns it. Don’t ask why you’re not allowed to see it.
Don’t ask why a convicted felon can write the code that counts your vote, but can’t cast one.
The real fraud isn’t coming from some shadowy ballot harvester in a hoodie. It’s wearing a suit, sitting on a board, and cashing federal contracts. The grift is legal. Institutionalized. Enshrined in law and protected by billion-dollar PR firms and bought politicians who’ve made an art form out of looking the other way.
What we’ve got isn’t a voting system. It’s a privatized faith-based trust exercise where you feed your vote into a black box and hope it comes out clean. You’re not supposed to question it. You’re supposed to salute it.
But I will question it. And I’ll keep naming names.
Because what they’ve built isn’t democracy. It’s a vending machine for power, programmed by profiteers and rubber-stamped by the very people who benefit from not fixing it.
And until we rip the curtain back and hold the machine-makers, the certifiers, and the lobbyists accountable, the votes might change, but the outcome never will.
A Brief Note From The Author:
Thanks for reading. I just want to tell you, I’m not a think tank. I’m not a PAC. I’m a mom, a nurse, and an investigative journalist doing the work the billionaires hope no one has time for.
I’ll continue dig through the court dockets they thought were forgotten. I’ll buy the probate records. I’ll file the FOIAs, comb the archives, hunt the shell companies, and stalk their social media trails until the truth crawls out. I will spend my time, my money, and whatever's left of my sanity to hold these people accountable because they count on you staying too busy, too tired, or too overwhelmed to notice.
If you're still reading, you’re already part of the resistance. This work takes hours. It takes obsession and it’s fueled by a grassroots fire they can’t extinguish.
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But no matter what thank you for being here. Because knowledge is half the fight and this is exactly what they don’t want you to know.
Thank you for taking the time to research and detail the history of this nightmare come true.
The question is, what is anyone doing about all this nonsense with the voting machines? I think it's clear that all these people are aligned with the far right, and I certainly don't expect they would put a stop to any of this. It's basically Project 2025 in action even longer than we've suspected. But do the Democrats in blue states and Congress know about this? Are they doing anything to stop it, or even bring this to the public's attention? This is infuriating!