Election Technology Failures: Who Profited from Broken Voting Hardware?
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Election Technology Failures: Who Profited from Broken Voting Hardware?
I. Introduction: The High Cost of Glitches
Defining the scope of widespread voting hardware failures in recent election cycles.
Modern democracy carries a staggering price tag, yet the machinery purchased to secure the vote often delivers chaos instead of clarity. Between 2020 and 2025, jurisdictions across the United States poured hundreds of millions into electronic voting systems promising efficiency and security. The reality, however, revealed a disturbing pattern where hardware malfunctions did not lead to refunds or vendor penalties. Instead, these failures generated lucrative new contracts for emergency repairs, upgrades, and replacements. For the few corporations controlling this oligopoly, a broken machine is rarely a liability; it is often the catalyst for a fresh revenue stream.
The operational failures in Maricopa County, Arizona, during the 2022 midterm elections provide the starkest example of this dysfunction. On Election Day, tabulators in roughly 20% of polling centers failed to read ballots. An independent investigation later attributed this to the onsite printers, specifically the Oki B432 models, which could not maintain sufficient heat to fuse toner onto the heavy cardstock paper required for ballots. These printers were retail grade units costing approximately $300 each. The failure caused immense public distrust and operational delays. The solution, however, was not to penalize the provider but to double down. By June 2023, Maricopa County officials approved a plan to spend $8.3 million (allocated from a $9 million budget) to replace the faulty hardware with upgraded Lexmark printers costing roughly $7,000 per unit. Runbeck Election Services, the vendor involved, secured this massive contract update without a competitive bidding process. A breakdown caused by inadequate hardware resulted in an eight million dollar payout to upgrade the same infrastructure.
Similar patterns emerged in Pennsylvania. In Northampton County, the 2023 election faced a critical failure when ExpressVote XL machines, manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), displayed a clerical error that flipped the names of two Superior Court judges on the printed paper summary. Voters selecting one candidate saw the opposing name on the verification slip. While officials insisted the digital tally remained accurate, the hardware interface failure forced the county to rely on emergency paper ballots. This was not an isolated incident for Northampton; the county had previously experienced touchscreen calibration issues in 2019. Despite these recurring glitches, ES&S maintained its foothold. In Dallas County, Texas, commissioners who previously opposed an ES&S contract found themselves approving an additional $500,000 for equipment in August 2024, mere months before electronic poll books froze and rebooted during the general election.
Georgia stands as the most expensive case study of the “upgrade trap” spanning the 2020 to 2025 period. After an initial $107 million investment in Dominion Voting Systems in 2019, the state faced continuous costs to keep the machinery functional. By early 2025, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger proposed a $52 million modification to the system. This proposal included $25 million for new printers and $4 million to replace backup batteries in the touchscreen ballot marking devices, many of which had degraded faster than anticipated. The removal of QR codes, a security feature demanded by critics, drove much of this new spending. The taxpayers of Georgia were effectively asked to pay half the original contract value again, just five years later, to address vulnerabilities and hardware limitations that existed at the time of purchase.
These incidents from 2020 through 2025 define a scope of failure that transcends simple technical errors. When a consumer buys a defective car, they invoke lemon laws. When a county buys defective voting systems, they sign maintenance contracts. The malfunction of voting hardware has evolved into a recurring cost of doing business, where the vendors are insulated from the financial consequences of their own engineering flaws. As we investigate who profited from these broken systems, the evidence points to a perverse incentive structure: the more maintenance the machines require, the more profitable the relationship becomes for the provider.
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II. The HAVA Windfall: Tracing the origin of modern election spending back to the 2002 Help America Vote Act
The passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002 marked the beginning of a lucrative era for private election vendors. While the original legislation aimed to modernize American democracy by retiring punch cards, it inadvertently created a dependency on private contractors that continues to consume vast sums of public money. Between 2020 and 2025, this cycle of spending intensified as jurisdictions rushed to replace aging equipment using new federal security grants.
Federal records show that the Election Assistance Commission distributed significant funds to states during this period. Congress appropriated $425 million in 2020, followed by $75 million in both 2022 and 2023, and another $55 million in 2024 under HAVA security grants. These funds were ostensibly designed to enhance security, yet they frequently flowed back to the same small group of vendors responsible for previous failures.
The Oligopoly of Failure
Three companies dominate the United States election market: Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic. This market concentration leaves local officials with few alternatives when technology fails. Contracts signed between 2020 and 2025 reveal that vendors often secure decade long agreements, insulating them from the financial consequences of malfunctions.
Georgia provides a stark example. The state awarded a $107 million contract to Dominion Voting Systems in 2019 to deploy ballot marking devices statewide. Documents show the state paid $89 million within the first two years. Despite this massive investment, the system faced scrutiny and required costly updates. The contract locks the state into a relationship where the vendor gets paid for maintenance regardless of performance issues that arise.
Case Study: Northampton County, Pennsylvania
The experience of Northampton County demonstrates how vendors profit even when their products malfunction. The county signed a $2.88 million contract with ES&S in 2019 for ExpressVote XL machines. In November 2023, a serious programming error caused these machines to mislabel votes in a judicial retention race. Voters selecting “Yes” saw their paper record reflect “No” and vice versa.
While the county and vendor attributed this to human error in file configuration, the incident revealed the fragility of the proprietary software used in public elections. Despite the failure, the county remained tethered to the vendor due to the prohibitive cost of switching systems. The vendor retained the contract, and the taxpayer funded the subsequent testing and legal oversight required to certify the results.
Dallas County and the Cost of Glitches
Similar issues plagued Dallas County, Texas. In 2024, electronic poll books provided by ES&S experienced widespread failures, with screens freezing and rebooting during early voting. These technical glitches delayed voters and cast doubt on the check in process. The county had previously signed a $2 million contract with the vendor. Instead of facing financial penalties, vendors often receive additional payments for “support services” to troubleshoot the very systems that caused the disruption.
The Perpetual Upgrade Cycle
The business model relies on planned obsolescence. The machines purchased with the original 2002 HAVA funds reached their end of life around 2020, triggering a new wave of purchases. The 2024 federal allocation of $55 million continues this trend. States like Pennsylvania received $1 million from this latest grant, which is often used to purchase proprietary hardware that will require expensive service contracts for years to come.
Election vendors have effectively captured the regulatory process. By establishing standards that only a few wealthy firms can meet, they ensure that every federal dollar appropriated for election security ends up in their accounts. The 2020 to 2025 period proves that broken hardware does not deter profit; in the current market, it guarantees future revenue through maintenance fees and emergency support contracts.
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III. Market Oligopoly: An analysis of the ‘Big Three’ vendors and the lack of competitive pricing mechanisms
The election technology sector in the United States operates under a rigid market structure that economists define as an oligopoly. From 2020 to 2025, three primary vendors controlled over 90 percent of the voting equipment market. These firms are Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic. This consolidation has created a vendor lock that stifles competition and obscures pricing transparency for taxpayers. While local election officials struggle with budget constraints, these corporations leverage their dominant positions to secure lucrative contracts with minimal external oversight.
Ownership structures of these vendors reveal a deep connection to private equity, prioritizing returns for investors over public utility. ES&S is owned by the McCarthy Group, while Hart InterCivic is controlled by H.I.G. Capital. Dominion Voting Systems was long held by Staple Street Capital until its acquisition by Liberty Vote in October 2025. This private ownership shields the companies from public financial disclosure laws. Unlike publicly traded companies, they are not required to publish annual reports or reveal profit margins. Consequently, jurisdictions often purchase equipment without access to a standardized price list, leading to vast disparities in costs for identical hardware across different counties.
The pricing mechanisms employed by the Big Three rely on a model similar to the printer and cartridge industry. The initial hardware is expensive, but the real revenue flows from proprietary licensing fees, warranties, and ballot printing costs. Between 2020 and 2024, counties in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania faced soaring costs for ballot marking devices. In Georgia, a statewide contract awarded to Dominion was valued at $107 million. Critics noted that hand marked paper ballots would have been significantly cheaper than the touchscreen systems installed. The widespread adoption of these complex machines has tethered states to specific vendors for maintenance and coding services, making it financially prohibitive to switch providers.
Lobbying plays a central role in maintaining this status quo. Vendors invest heavily in government relations to influence procurement rules. For instance, ES&S and its affiliates have spent millions on lobbying efforts to ensure that legislative requirements favor their specific technology, such as barcode readers, over open source alternatives. In Philadelphia, a controversial selection process in 2019 led to a $29 million contract for ES&S, despite protests regarding the cost and security of the machines. These legacy contracts remained in force through the 2024 election cycle, locking the city into a relationship that competitors could not break.
The 2025 sale of Dominion Voting Systems to Liberty Vote marked a significant shift in the landscape. While the ownership changed, the underlying market dynamics remained untouched. The acquisition highlighted the high valuation of these firms, driven by the guaranteed revenue streams from government contracts. Even after the company received a $787 million settlement from Fox News in 2023, the cost of its hardware to municipalities did not decrease. Instead, the industry saw a trend toward further consolidation. With Liberty Vote now managing a massive share of the infrastructure, the options for local election boards have narrowed even further.
This lack of competition has direct consequences for election security and reliability. When a single firm creates the software, manufactures the hardware, and manages the testing, the incentive to innovate or lower prices diminishes. Failures in one jurisdiction rarely lead to market consequences because the alternative vendors offer nearly identical terms and proprietary constraints. By 2025, the oligopoly had effectively insulated itself from market forces, leaving American voters reliant on a closed system where broken hardware and rising costs are absorbed entirely by the public purse.
IV. The Procurement Game: How restrictive Request for Proposal (RFP) language favors incumbents and excludes innovators
The deepest moat protecting the election technology oligopoly is not intellectual property or superior engineering. It is the Request for Proposal, or RFP. This bureaucratic document, theoretically designed to ensure fair competition, has mutated into a weapon of exclusion. Between 2020 and 2025, a pattern emerged across jurisdictions from New York to Louisiana: procurement rules were written with such specificity that they effectively predetermined the winner before a single bid was submitted.
The market reality is stark. As of 2024, three major corporations—Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic—commanded nearly 90 percent of the United States voting equipment market. This dominance is not accidental. It is reinforced by procurement officers who copy and paste technical requirements directly from the sales brochures of these incumbent vendors. The result is a cycle of vendor lock in that stifles innovation and inflates costs for taxpayers.
The Mechanics of Exclusion
The rigging of an RFP happens in the fine print. Investigative analysis of contracts awarded between 2020 and 2024 reveals three primary mechanisms used to disqualify new competitors:
- The Experience Trap: RFPs frequently mandate that a vendor must have deployed their system in a jurisdiction of similar population size within the last five years. This requirement creates an impossible barrier for new entrants like VotingWorks or other open source disruptors. They cannot win a major contract without prior experience, yet they cannot gain experience without winning a contract.
- Proprietary Specifications: In 2021 and 2022, several county level RFPs included mandatory physical dimensions for voting terminals that matched the exact specifications of the ES&S ExpressVote XL or the Dominion ImageCast to the millimeter. By mandating a specific screen size or a proprietary paper path, officials ensured that no other hardware could qualify.
- Bundling Services: innovative startups often focus on one specific problem, such as secure ballot marking or transparent auditing. However, procurement offices increasingly bundle voter registration databases, poll books, and tabulation hardware into a single “all or nothing” contract. This favors massive conglomerates that offer a suite of mediocre products over specialized firms offering superior individual components.
Case Study: The New York Certification Battle
The power of the incumbent lobby was fully visible in New York during 2023. The State Board of Elections certified the ES&S ExpressVote XL despite strenuous objections from cybersecurity experts and good government groups. Critics noted that the machine, which combines a touchscreen with a printer in one unit, presented security risks and high costs compared to hand marked paper ballots.
The procurement process revealed the systemic bias. The certification standards and subsequent county level RFPs prioritized “ease of administration” and seamless integration with legacy software over security architecture or cost efficiency. The decision effectively cleared the path for ES&S to expand its footprint in the fourth most populous state, while simpler and cheaper alternatives were sidelined by regulatory hurdles designed for the complex machinery of the giants.
Case Study: Louisiana and the Cancelled Bid
In a rare moment of transparency, the messy reality of the procurement game surfaced in Louisiana in 2021. Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin was forced to cancel a voting machine search process after allegations arose that the RFP had been drawn too narrowly, ostensibly benefiting the incumbent, Dominion Voting Systems. Competitors and state lawmakers argued that the requirements precluded a fair search for the best technology. While the state cited “misinformation” as the cause for the delay, the underlying dispute highlighted how specific RFP language can ignite political firestorms and freeze technological progress.
The Financial Cost of Stagnation
This protectionist procurement system has a direct financial toll. Without genuine competition, prices remain artificially high. Data from 2022 suggests that jurisdictions locked into long contracts with the “Big Three” pay significantly more per voter than those using competitive bidding or modular systems. Furthermore, the lack of pressure to innovate leaves critical security vulnerabilities unpatched. When a vendor knows they are the only one who qualifies for the next contract renewal, the incentive to improve security protocols vanishes.
The RFP process, intended to be a shield against corruption, has become a sword against competition. Until legislation mandates open standards and prohibits vendor specific requirements, the voting technology market will remain a closed shop, profiting the few at the expense of the electorate.
V. Vendor Dependency: Investigating the Proprietary Nature of Election Hardware
When a county purchases a fleet of voting machines, taxpayers might assume they own the equipment. In reality, they have merely purchased a license to operate a terminal that remains tethered to the manufacturer for its entire lifespan. Between 2020 and 2025, an examination of procurement contracts and service invoices reveals a business model built on exclusive hardware control. This section investigates how major vendors utilize proprietary memory media, restrictive cables, and exorbitant support fees to prevent independent repairs, effectively turning public infrastructure into a private rental stream.
The Four Gigabyte Tollbooth
The most egregious example of manufactured dependency lies in the humble memory card. In consumer electronics, a standard 4GB flash drive costs less than five dollars. However, in the election technology sector, data storage is treated as a specialized component that local officials are forbidden from sourcing elsewhere.
Procurement documents from Election Systems & Software (ES&S) explicitly warn customers that their required media is “not a common flash drive” and must be purchased directly from the vendor. This hardware restriction prevents election administrators from using commercial off the shelf alternatives, forcing them to pay a premium for verified media. While the initial machine cost often includes one memory device, the replacement or expansion of these cards triggers a new revenue event for the vendor. By using custom formatting or proprietary pin configurations, manufacturers ensure that no generic competitor can offer a cheaper alternative without voiding the system warranty.
The High Price of Technician Access
The physical hardware is further protected by a service model that bars local IT staff from performing basic maintenance. Modern voting machines are effectively sealed black boxes. If a screen malfunctions or a cable port fails, county technicians are legally and contractually blocked from opening the chassis to effect repairs.
Data from Ohio pricing sheets in the 2020 to 2024 period highlights the steep cost of this exclusivity. When a jurisdiction requires support beyond the standard warranty, ES&S listed an on site setup and support fee of $1,850 per person per day. This daily rate far exceeds the cost of hiring a local master electrician or computer engineer. Yet, because the vendor retains exclusive rights to service the internal components, counties have no choice but to pay. The pricing structure creates a perverse incentive: the harder the machine is to fix for the owner, the more profitable it becomes for the maker.
A New Name, Same Old Chains
The landscape of vendor control shifted dramatically in late 2025, though the underlying mechanics of dependency remained. Dominion Voting Systems, a central player in the market, was acquired by Liberty Vote, a new entity controlled by the owner of KnowInk. While the brand name changed, the proprietary architecture did not. The 2025 acquisition consolidated two major components of the voting infrastructure—pollbooks and tabulators—under one corporate roof.
This consolidation deepens the dependency. A jurisdiction using KnowInk pollbooks and Liberty Vote tabulators now faces a single point of failure and a unified pricing structure. The integration of these systems often relies on proprietary cables and connection protocols that reject hardware from rival firms. This “walled garden” approach ensures that once a county enters the ecosystem, the cost of switching vendors becomes prohibitively high, locking taxpayers into a cycle of rising maintenance fees and mandatory hardware refreshes.
The Legislative Blind Spot
While the “Right to Repair” movement gained momentum in the automotive and consumer electronics sectors between 2022 and 2024, voting systems were largely excluded from these victories. Legislators in states like Maine and New York passed laws requiring manufacturers to share diagnostic data with independent shops, but security concerns allowed election vendors to carve out exemptions. This regulatory gap leaves voting machines as one of the few remaining categories of technology where the owner has no legal right to understand or repair the inner workings of their property.
The result is a system where broken hardware generates profit rather than penalty. Until legislation mandates open standards for memory media and peripheral connections, election officials will remain captive customers, and the true cost of casting a ballot will continue to rise.
VI. The Service Contract Racket: How expensive, mandatory maintenance agreements generate more profit than initial hardware sales.
The business of democracy has undergone a quiet but profitable transformation. While the public focuses on the sticker price of new voting machines, the real revenue stream for election technology vendors lies in the fine print of service contracts. Between 2020 and 2025, major vendors like Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software (ES&S) shifted their profit models away from onetime hardware sales toward perpetual licensing and mandatory maintenance agreements. This approach mirrors the software industry subscription model, effectively forcing local governments to rent the ability to conduct elections.
An investigation into municipal procurement records reveals that initial hardware costs are often just the entry fee. The substantial profits are generated through long term service contracts that lock jurisdictions into proprietary ecosystems. For example, documents from Placer County, California, detail a contract amendment with Dominion Voting Systems extending through 2033. While the amendment included a hardware purchase of approximately $465,000, the total remaining contract value for licensing and support exceeded $3.1 million. Crucially, the agreement included an escalator clause increasing annual licensing and support costs by 3% every year. This structure ensures that the vendor revenue stream grows automatically, regardless of inflation or service quality.
This financial disparity is not an anomaly but an industry standard. In Georgia, the state committed to a $107 million contract with Dominion in 2019 to replace its voting system. While $89 million was allocated for the initial rollout, the contract established a decade long relationship where the vendor retains control over the software and maintenance. The maintenance creates a vendor lock where switching providers becomes fiscally impossible. The Brennan Center for Justice noted in 2024 that replacing outdated voting equipment would cost hundreds of millions nationwide, yet their estimates explicitly excluded the “maintenance costs for security patches, software upgrades, and licensing fees” which often double the total cost of ownership over the system lifespan.
The “racket” operates on a simple mechanism: proprietary control. Voting machines run on closed source software that only the original manufacturer can service. If a county attempts to service the machines using independent technicians or third party parts, they risk voiding the warranty and decertifying the equipment. North Carolina state regulations, for instance, mandate that counties maintain software licenses to keep warranties valid. This legal framework grants vendors a monopoly on maintenance. They can charge premium rates for support because the alternative is decertification, which would render the multimillion dollar hardware investment useless.
The consequences of this dependency were starkly illustrated in Maricopa County, Arizona. Following an independent audit of the 2020 election equipment, county officials determined they could no longer verify the chain of custody for their machines. Consequently, the county had to pursue the acquisition of new equipment, a cost estimated at $2.8 million. The vendor control over the security architecture meant that once the machines left the approved chain of custody, they were effectively bricked, requiring a complete and expensive replacement rather than a simple security wipe and reset.
Private equity ownership of these vendors further drives the demand for recurring revenue. Investors prize predictable cash flow over cyclical hardware sales spikes. By converting election infrastructure into a service, companies ensure steady quarterly returns funded by taxpayer dollars. The certification process acts as a final barrier to competition. As noted in Department of Justice filings, achieving federal and state certification can cost millions and take years, preventing new competitors from entering the market and driving down service costs. The result is an oligopoly where jurisdictions are trapped in abusive relationships with their vendors, paying increasing fees for the same aging technology year after year.
VII. Planned Obsolescence: Examining why voting machines are engineered with short lifecycles to force frequent upgrades
The modern voting machine is no longer a durable piece of public infrastructure. It has become a disposable consumer electronic, mirroring the short lifecycles of smartphones or laptops. Unlike the lever machines of the past, which served reliably for decades, digital voting systems are now engineered with an inherent expiration date. This phenomenon, known as planned obsolescence, forces jurisdictions into a perpetual cycle of expensive replacements, generating immense profits for a tight oligopoly of private vendors while draining public coffers. Between 2020 and 2025, this pattern accelerated, driven by proprietary software restrictions, arbitrary support cutoffs, and legislative mandates that rendered functioning hardware useless.
The Software Trap and Operating System Dependency
A primary driver of this forced obsolescence is the reliance on commercial software with fixed support windows. Most voting systems run on modified versions of Microsoft Windows. When the underlying operating system reaches its end of support, the voting hardware often must be discarded, regardless of its physical condition. This reality created a crisis across multiple states regarding Windows 7 and subsequently Windows 10.
In 2023, election officials in New York and other jurisdictions faced pressure to retire systems simply because security patches for older software were no longer available. Vendors such as ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems utilize these software cliffs to trigger contract renegotiations. Instead of offering a simple software patch, they frequently present full system replacements as the only viable security solution. In Onondaga County, New York, this dynamic contributed to a 3.5 million dollar investment in 2023 for new Clear Vote systems, replacing Dominion units that were merely a decade old but deemed digitally obsolete.
Legislative Obsolescence: The Georgia Case Study
The most egregious example of manufactured obsolescence occurred in Georgia between 2024 and 2025. In 2019, the state purchased a statewide system from Dominion for 107 million dollars. By 2024, perfectly functional scanners and ballot marking devices were targeted for replacement not due to failure, but due to a new legal requirement to eliminate QR codes from ballots.
Senate Bill 189, passed in 2024, effectively rendered the existing fleet noncompliant. The hardware functioned exactly as designed, yet the mandate to produce human readable text instead of barcodes forced a massive financial burden. Initial estimates for this modification sat at 32.5 million dollars. By 2025, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger revealed the actual cost to taxpayers would swell to 66 million dollars. This expenditure involved purchasing 33,000 new ballot printers and updated memory cards. The vendor profited twice: first from the original sale in 2019, and again just five years later to “upgrade” the same system to meet arbitrary new standards. This 66 million dollar patch effectively cost more than half the price of the entire original network, illustrating how policy and proprietary design intertwine to force spending.
The Vendor Profit Loop
The marketplace for election technology is dominated by three firms: ES&S, Dominion, and Hart InterCivic. This lack of competition allows these companies to dictate terms that favor replacement over repair. Contracts signed from 2020 to 2025 reveal a shift toward licensing models where hardware is merely a delivery mechanism for expensive annual software fees.
In Louisiana, a project to replace voting machines saw cost projections jump from an initial 40 million dollars to over 90 million dollars by the time Dominion was identified as the bidder. The escalation was justified by “enhanced security features,” a vague selling point that often masks minor incremental updates. Similarly, the Brennan Center for Justice estimated in 2022 that replacing aging equipment fielded between 2010 and 2016 would cost the nation over 580 million dollars. This figure represents a transfer of wealth from local tax bases to private corporations for technology that rarely lasts beyond two major election cycles.
Vendors also enforce obsolescence through proprietary consumables. By strictly controlling the supply of paper rolls, ink, and memory devices, they ensure that older machines cannot be maintained by third party technicians. When a vendor decides a model is “end of life,” they simply cease manufacturing the specific custom cables or batteries required to keep it running, forcing the county to upgrade the entire fleet.
Conclusion
The narrative that voting machines must be replaced every few years for security is a marketing strategy disguised as a technical necessity. By tying critical democratic infrastructure to the volatile lifecycles of commercial software and proprietary hardware, vendors have secured a guaranteed revenue stream. The data from 2020 to 2025 confirms that taxpayers are paying premium prices for equipment that is designed to fail, technically or legally, long before its physical components wear out.
VIII. The Revolving Door: Tracking Election Officials Who Award Contracts and Subsequently Accept Jobs With Those Same Vendors
The integrity of American elections relies on a distinct separation between the public servants who administer the vote and the private corporations that manufacture the machinery. However, an analysis of employment data from 2020 to 2025 reveals a troubling trend where this boundary has dissolved. A lucrative pipeline now exists between county election offices and the headquarters of major voting technology vendors. This “revolving door” phenomenon raises urgent questions about whether procurement decisions are driven by public interest or future career prospects.
From Regulator to Vendor: The Arizona Connection
The movement of personnel from state oversight bodies to private vendors creates an immediate conflict of interest regarding security standards. In August 2022, Ken Matta left his position as the election security officer for the Arizona Secretary of State to become the Chief Information Officer for Runbeck Election Services. Runbeck is a critical player in Arizona elections, responsible for printing and mailing millions of ballots.
While at the Secretary of State office, Matta was responsible for enforcing security protocols that companies like Runbeck had to follow. His transition to a C suite executive role at the very firm he previously helped regulate exemplifies the classic revolving door. It grants the vendor intimate knowledge of state vulnerability assessments and regulatory loopholes, potentially prioritizing corporate efficiency over rigorous public oversight.
The Dallas Shuffle: Heider Garcia and Hart InterCivic
A more recent and striking example occurred in Texas involving veteran election administrator Heider Garcia. Garcia served as the Elections Administrator for Tarrant County until 2023, then took the same role in Dallas County in 2024. During his tenure, these counties relied heavily on electronic systems to manage voter check ins and tabulation.
In November 2024, Dallas County experienced significant operational issues with its electronic poll books provided by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). Following the fallout from these technical failures, Garcia resigned in August 2025. Less than a month later, he was hired by Hart InterCivic, a direct competitor to ES&S, as their Vice President of Customer Success.
This move places a former client, who held the keys to multimillion dollar municipal contracts, directly into the sales and retention engine of a major vendor. Garcia now utilizes his insider status to navigate the procurement processes of the very peers he once worked alongside. The optics suggest a system where administrators can audition for lucrative private sector roles by managing public contracts, regardless of whether the technology succeeds or fails.
The Ultimate Acquisition: Liberty Vote
The most significant consolidation of public authority and private ownership occurred in 2025 with the sale of Dominion Voting Systems. The buyer was not a traditional private equity firm but a new entity called Liberty Vote, led by Scott Leiendecker.
Leiendecker began his career as the Republican Director of Elections for the City of St. Louis. He leveraged that experience to found KNOWiNK, a vendor specializing in electronic poll books. His trajectory from a local election official to the owner of the largest voting equipment manufacturer in North America represents the apex of the revolving door.
By 2025, Leiendecker had successfully transitioned from a public servant managing a city budget to a corporate titan controlling the infrastructure of democracy. His acquisition of Dominion (rebranded under Liberty Vote) consolidates immense power in the hands of a former official who knows exactly how to craft RFPs and win bids because he used to write them.
The Cost of Access
These transitions are not merely career upgrades; they are transfers of intellectual capital that disadvantage the taxpayer. When officials leave for vendors, they take with them the knowledge of municipal budget limits, negotiation weaknesses, and internal political pressures. The vendors profit from this inside track, often securing contracts that lock jurisdictions into proprietary ecosystems for decades.
As the market for voting hardware shrinks to a few dominant players, the presence of former officials in their executive rows ensures that the relationship between buyer and seller remains cozy, compliant, and closed to outside scrutiny.
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Election Technology Failures: Who Profited from Broken Voting Hardware?
SECTION IX. Lobbying the Statehouses: A financial review of vendor campaign contributions to Secretaries of State and legislators.
The machinery of democracy is breaking down, yet the vendors responsible for the gears and cogs have never been more profitable. While voters in Dallas County stood in confusion during the 2024 General Election, misled by glitching electronic pollbooks, the company behind the failure was securing its position through a sophisticated web of lobbying and financial influence. This section examines the flow of money from voting technology vendors to the very officials charged with regulating them, revealing a system where failure is rarely punished and contracts are insulated by campaign cash.
The Dallas Failure and the Austin Lobby
In December 2024, the Texas Secretary of State took the rare step of decertifying electronic pollbooks manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). This decision followed a disastrous performance in Dallas County where the devices issued incorrect ballot styles to thousands of voters. For any other government contractor, such a catastrophic failure might spell the end of state business. For ES&S, it was merely a hurdle to be managed by their government relations team.
Public records from 2024 and 2025 reveal that while their machines were failing at the precinct level, ES&S maintained a robust lobbying presence in Austin. The company, along with competitors like Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic, utilizes a strategy that bypasses direct bribery in favor of institutional capture. They do not just lobby legislators; they fund the associations that bring election officials together.
The NASS Corporate Loophole
The primary vehicle for this influence is the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS). Through its “Corporate Affiliate” program, vendors pay thousands of dollars annually to sponsor conferences where they gain exclusive access to the top election officials from every state. These are the same officials who certify voting systems and approve contracts.
According to 2024 membership rolls, ES&S held “Gold Level” status within NASS, granting their executives, such as Vice President of Government Relations Jeb Cameron, direct access to Secretaries of State at events in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. This access allows vendors to frame the narrative around “glitches” as minor technical hiccups rather than systemic failures requiring contract termination.
This financial relationship creates a conflict of interest that is nearly impossible to untangle. When a Secretary of State accepts a vendor sponsorship for their annual conference, they are accepting funds from the very entities they are sworn to oversee. The result is a regulatory environment where decertification, like the one seen in Texas, is the exception rather than the rule.
The Revolving Door: From Regulator to Vendor
The influence machine extends beyond contributions and sponsorships. It includes a lucrative revolving door that incentivizes election officials to maintain friendly relations with vendors while in office. A stark example occurred in late 2025 when Dominion Voting Systems was sold to a group including Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican election official. This move signaled a troubling trend: the privatization of election administration into the hands of former partisan operatives.
This pattern is not new. ES&S has a long history of hiring former state election directors to lead their lobbying efforts. By hiring the regulators, these companies ensure they have insiders who know exactly how to navigate the complex certification mazes and how to smooth over technical failures that would otherwise jeopardize multi million dollar contracts.
Following the Money: 2020 to 2025
A review of campaign finance data and lobbying disclosures from 2020 to 2025 highlights a consistent trend of spending to protect market share:
- Georgia: Despite widespread questions regarding the vulnerability of the Dominion system (specifically the Democracy Suite 5.17 software), the state stuck with its $107 million contract. Vendor representatives were regular fixtures at committee hearings in 2023 and 2024, assuring legislators that security patches were sufficient, effectively stalling any movement toward alternative systems.
- Pennsylvania: In counties like Philadelphia and Montgomery, ES&S secured tens of millions in contracts. Lobbying records show consistent engagement with county commissioners and state officials, ensuring that when the state mandated new paper trail machines, ES&S was the preferred vendor despite higher costs.
- Arizona: In Maricopa and Apache counties, printer failures and tabulation issues plagued the 2022 and 2024 cycles. Yet, the incumbent vendors faced little risk of replacement. Legal battles often targeted the election officials, while the vendors who provided the malfunctioning hardware remained shielded by indemnity clauses and strong legislative allies.
Conclusion: Profit Without Accountability
The data paints a clear picture. The election technology market is not a free market driven by performance or reliability. It is a captured market driven by relationships and access. When hardware breaks, as it did in Texas and Arizona, the vendors do not pay a price. Instead, they pay a lobbyist. Until the financial link between vendors and election officials is severed, the American voter will continue to cast ballots on machines built by companies that profit more from their connections than their competence.
“`The following investigative report examines the barriers limiting competition in the United States voting technology market. It focuses on the certification process between 2020 and 2025.
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Election Technology Failures: Who Profited from Broken Voting Hardware?
Section X. Certification Barriers
The United States election technology market is dominated by three private corporations. These entities control over 90 percent of voting infrastructure. While critics often point to market consolidation as the primary issue, a more subtle mechanism protects this oligopoly. The federal and state certification process, designed to ensure security, effectively acts as a financial moat. It stifles innovation and blocks affordable competitors from entering the field.
From 2020 to 2025, this certification regime created a paradox. The very rules intended to secure elections prevented the adoption of newer, more transparent systems. High costs and bureaucratic delays favored legacy vendors like ES&S, Dominion, and Hart InterCivic. These companies possessed the capital to navigate the labyrinth of testing, while smaller groups faced insurmountable hurdles.
The VVSG 2.0 Freeze
The most significant recent barrier emerged during the transition to the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0. Adopted by the Election Assistance Commission in early 2021, these new standards promised better security and interoperability. However, the implementation process created a market freeze.
Testing laboratories required accreditation to inspect machines under the new rules. This accreditation did not occur until November 2022. During this gap, legacy vendors continued selling older systems certified under previous standards. New entrants, however, were often mandated to meet the latest 2.0 benchmarks. Because no lab could legally test them, these innovators were locked out of the federal process entirely for nearly two years. This delay forced jurisdictions to renew contracts with established providers rather than exploring modern alternatives.
The Price of Compliance
Certification is not merely a technical exam; it is a war of attrition. A full federal certification campaign can cost millions of dollars and take years to complete. The fees go to accredited Voting System Test Laboratories, which charge hourly rates for line by line code review and hardware stress testing.
State requirements add another layer of expense. States like Texas and New York impose their own rigorous testing protocols on top of federal clearance. For a startup with limited capital, paying for federal testing plus unique exams for individual states is impossible. Large incumbents absorb these costs easily, spreading them across thousands of jurisdictions. They effectively amortize the regulatory burden, making it a competitive advantage rather than a liability.
The Struggle for Open Code
The nonprofit VotingWorks offers the clearest example of this struggle. As the only significant vendor offering publicly available code, VotingWorks aims to increase trust through transparency. Their system runs on affordable commercial hardware rather than proprietary black boxes. Despite offering a system that security experts praise for its auditability, VotingWorks faced immense challenges scaling beyond pilot programs in Mississippi and New Hampshire.
Between 2021 and 2024, VotingWorks had to navigate the VVSG 2.0 deadlock. While they waited for labs to open, incumbents sold older technology that would not meet modern security standards if tested today. The rules allowed legacy systems to remain “certified” indefinitely unless a major change occurred, protecting obsolete machines while blocking advanced secure code.
By 2025, VotingWorks finally neared federal certification, but only after years of delays that had nothing to do with the quality of their software and everything to do with bureaucratic timing. The system effectively punished them for being new.
Security or Protectionism?
Election officials often defend these barriers as necessary for security. They argue that rigorous testing prevents failures. Yet, the failures of 2020 and subsequent years often involved certified legacy equipment. Screen calibration errors, printer jams, and proprietary software glitches plagued elections despite the certification seal.
The certification regime has mutated. It no longer solely filters out bad technology; it filters out companies lacking deep financial reserves. By keeping costs high and timelines long, the system ensures that only the largest corporations can profit from democracy. Until the certification process is streamlined to welcome open code and modular innovation, the American voter will remain dependent on a handful of private firms for the machinery of freedom.
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XI. Case Study: The Touchscreen Calibration Failures and the Costs of Emergency Paper Ballot Provisional Supplies
The promise of modern voting systems was efficiency and accuracy. Yet, between 2020 and 2025, a recurring technical failure known as calibration drift turned the most expensive equipment in the precinct into a liability. When a voter presses a name on a digital interface and the system highlights the opposing candidate, trust evaporates. This phenomenon, often attributed to screen sensitivity or coordinate mapping errors, forces election officials to abandon digital tabulation in favor of emergency paper ballots. An investigation into these failures reveals a financial paradox: taxpayers fund the acquisition of complex digital systems while simultaneously paying premium rates for the analog supplies required when those systems fail.
The Anatomy of a Calibration Failure
Calibration issues occur when the physical touch point on a screen does not align with the digital coordinate of the candidate selection. In October 2024, Laurel County, Kentucky, became the center of a national firestorm when a video circulated showing a Ballot Marking Device refusing to accept a selection for a specific presidential candidate. While local officials attributed the error to the voter touching the “area between boxes,” the incident highlighted the fragility of touchscreen inputs.
A more systemic failure occurred in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, during the November 2023 election. The county had deployed ExpressVote XL machines manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). On Election Day, voters noticed that their printed paper records showed the names of judicial retention candidates swapped. A vote to retain Judge Panella appeared as a vote for Judge Stabile. Officials scrambled to switch to emergency paper ballots, disrupting the process and extending wait times.
The Cost of Redundancy
The financial winner in these scenarios is often the vendor ecosystem that supplies both the primary technology and the emergency backup. When a jurisdiction purchases a voting fleet, they are not just buying machines; they are signing contracts for proprietary consumables. The “emergency provisional ballot” is not merely a generic sheet of paper. It must often be printed on specific stock weight and size to be compatible with the high speed scanners used for final tabulation. This requirement funnels the emergency spending back to certified print shops or the machine vendors themselves.
In the aftermath of the Northampton failure, the county faced immediate logistical costs. While the vendor acknowledged a “clerical error” in the database configuration rather than a hardware defect, the result was the same: the expensive machines were rendered unusable for reliable verification, and the county relied on paper reserves. The following data highlights the financial exposure jurisdictions face when technology falters:
| Item | Estimated Unit Cost | Impact of Failure |
|---|---|---|
| Ballot Marking Device (BMD) | $5,000 per unit | Capital investment sits idle during calibration lockouts. |
| Emergency Paper Ballots | $0.50 to $0.80 per ballot | Urgent reorders incur rush fees and shipping premiums. |
| Litigation & Settlement | $30,000+ | Legal costs paid by the county (e.g., Luzerne County 2024 settlement). |
| Technician Support | $200 per hour | Vendors bill for site support to recalibrate or patch systems. |
Vendor Profit from Fragility
The investigation suggests a disturbing economic loop. Large vendors like ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems dominate the market, securing contracts that can exceed $100 million for statewide implementation, as seen in Georgia. These contracts cover the machinery but often treat the paper backup supplies as consumable add ons. When the screens drift or the software flips votes, the vendor generates revenue from the service call to fix the machine and potentially from the surge in demand for paper supplies needed to keep the polls open.
In 2022 and 2023, counties across Pennsylvania and Georgia faced budget adjustments to stockpile provisional materials. The shift from “paperless” DRE machines to Ballot Marking Devices was intended to provide a paper trail, but it effectively doubled the cost per vote. The county pays for the digital interface to mark the ballot and the paper to record it. When the interface fails, the paper remains the only functional component, yet the sunk cost of the digital machinery remains on the ledger. The vendors essentially sell a solution that requires them to sell a second solution (paper) to mitigate the risks of the first.
Ultimately, the profiting entities are the technology providers who have successfully monetized the complexity of the voting process. By replacing a simple pen and paper with a $5,000 touchscreen that mimics a pen and paper, they have created a market where equipment failure does not result in a refund, but rather an additional purchase of emergency supplies to fulfill the most basic function of democracy.
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XII. Security as an Upsell: How vendors charge taxpayers extra for basic security patches and software updates
The business model driving the election technology industry relies on a mechanism familiar to anyone who has purchased a cheap inkjet printer only to spend a fortune on ink. In the voting machine market, however, the expensive consumable is not ink. It is security. An examination of contracts and vendor disputes from 2020 through 2025 reveals a disturbing trend where basic reliability, software patches, and operating system updates are treated not as standard warranties but as premium features. This structure forces local governments to pay exorbitant fees to protect democratic infrastructure from obsolescence and cyber threats.
The crisis became visible in early 2020. As election officials prepared for a high stakes presidential contest, a significant portion of the voting fleet in the United States ran on Windows 7. Microsoft had scheduled the operating system for “end of support” in January 2020, meaning it would no longer receive standard security updates. In a healthy market, vendors would have updated their hardware to a current operating system years in advance. Instead, companies like Dominion Voting Systems and ES&S had equipment deployed that was effectively obsolete upon installation. The situation grew so dire that Microsoft intervened, offering free security updates for federally certified voting systems through the 2020 election. This was a temporary reprieve for a systemic failure. The vendors had successfully shifted the technical debt of their aging platforms onto the public ledger.
Once the initial warranty expires, the financial burden on taxpayers creates a cycle of dependency. Contracts from New York to South Dakota show that purchasing the machine is merely the entry fee. The real revenue stream flows from annual licensing and maintenance agreements. In South Dakota, contract terms allowed ES&S to increase software license and maintenance fees by up to five percent annually. These fees do not guarantee new features; they simply keep the system legal and operational. In Mariposa County, California, a contract amendment with Dominion Voting Systems extending to 2027 included “managed service” fees totaling nearly $50,000 annually for a small jurisdiction. These recurring costs function as a subscription service for democracy, where the penalty for nonpayment is a loss of certification and the ability to hold a valid election.
The most egregious example of security as a luxury good appeared in Georgia. The state purchased a $107 million statewide system from Dominion in 2019. By 2023, security experts and transparency advocates argued that the QR codes used on printed ballots concealed voter intent and should be removed. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger proposed a software update to eliminate the codes and allow voters to verify their choices via plain text. The cost for this transparency was not included in the original nine figure price tag. Instead, the state faced a choice: pay approximately $15 million for a software rollout or spend $66 million to replace printer hardware entirely. The legislature balked at the cost, leaving the security concern unresolved for the 2024 election cycle. Here, a fundamental patch to address voter trust was priced as a premium upgrade.
This leverage extends beyond voting machines to the backend systems that manage voter rolls. In 2024, Texas counties faced a “surprise surcharge” from Votec, a vendor managing voter registration data. The company demanded tens of thousands of dollars in unexpected fees, implying that failure to pay could disrupt operations just months before the general election. This ultimatum highlights the fragility of privatized election infrastructure. Vendors control the data and the code, giving them leverage to demand payments that municipal budgets cannot sustain.
The data is clear. Between 2020 and 2025, the cost of maintaining voting equipment rose not because the machinery improved, but because vendors successfully monetized the fear of failure. By keeping hardware on the edge of obsolescence and charging a premium for the software that keeps it secure, the industry has turned election security into a recurring upsell rather than a fundamental guarantee.
XIII. Private Equity Ownership: Unveiling the opaque investment firms behind the voting tech companies and their profit mandates.
The machinery of American democracy is not owned by the public. It belongs to a small cluster of private equity firms. These opaque investment vehicles control the three vendors that administer elections for over 90% of the United States. While voters cast ballots in school gyms and community centers, the true ownership of the hardware lies in the portfolios of Staple Street Capital, the McCarthy Group, and Enlighten Capital. Between 2020 and 2025, these firms demonstrated that profitability often divorces itself from performance. In fact, systemic controversy can yield massive financial returns.
The most striking example of profit amidst chaos occurred with Dominion Voting Systems. Acquired by the New York private equity firm Staple Street Capital in 2018, Dominion became the center of a political firestorm following the 2020 election. While the reputational damage seemed catastrophic, the financial reality for its owners was the opposite. In April 2023, Dominion settled a defamation lawsuit against Fox News for $787.5 million. Financial documents analyzed after the settlement suggested that Staple Street Capital stood to gain approximately $600 million from this single payout. This figure represented a staggering return on their initial investment, estimated at roughly $38 million. The controversy did not bankrupt the owners; it enriched them. By October 2025, Staple Street exited its position, selling Dominion to Liberty Vote, a newly formed entity. The private equity firm walked away with a windfall generated not by flawless election administration, but by the litigation surrounding its challenges.
Election Systems & Software (ES&S) controls an even larger share of the market than Dominion, yet it operates with similar opacity under the ownership of the McCarthy Group. The consequences of this ownership model appeared starkly in November 2023 in Northampton County, Pennsylvania. Voters attempting to retain Superior Court judges noticed a disturbing glitch: the ES&S ExpressVote XL machines printed paper records that flipped their choices. A “Yes” vote for one judge appeared as a “No” on the receipt. The company attributed this failure to a coding error and inadequate testing. For a private equity asset, such failures often stem from the mandate to maximize efficiency over redundancy. The McCarthy Group maintains strict silence regarding its operational influence, yet its portfolio company continues to secure lucrative contracts despite repeated hardware malfunctions.
Hart InterCivic, the third major player, presents a similar narrative of hidden financial backers. Historically linked to H.I.G. Capital, the firm has navigated the 2020 to 2025 period with little disclosure regarding its capitalization structure. While Hart achieved certification for its Verity Vanguard system in 2025, the development cycle for such technology often lags behind the pace of modern security threats. Private equity models typically favor extending the lifespan of legacy hardware to avoid the capital expenditure required for new research and development. This profit driven stagnation leaves jurisdictions dependent on aging equipment that is increasingly prone to error.
The incentive structure for these firms is clear. Public service requires transparency, durability, and redundancy. Private equity demands efficiency, cost reduction, and rapid returns. The data from 2020 through 2025 reveals that these mandates are incompatible. When machines in Northampton County failed in 2023, the cost fell on the voters who lost trust in the system. When Dominion became a household name for the wrong reasons, its owners extracted hundreds of millions of dollars. The voting technology market suffers from a capture by financial interests that profit regardless of whether the machines work perfectly or fail spectacularly.
XIV. The Hybrid Machine Controversy: Analyzing the push for expensive Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) over hand marked paper ballots.
The narrative sold to the American public following the chaotic 2020 election was simple: paper ballots ensure security. Yet, a quiet but lucrative transformation of voting infrastructure between 2020 and 2025 replaced simple hand marked paper ballots with complex, expensive computers known as Ballot Marking Devices. This shift enriched a small oligopoly of private vendors while introducing new vulnerabilities into the democratic process.
The Financial Incentive: Complexity Monetized
The core of the controversy lies in the vast disparity in cost between the two primary voting methods. Hand marked paper ballot systems rely on inexpensive pens and simple optical scanners. In contrast, Ballot Marking Devices are capital intensive computers that feature touchscreens, printers, and proprietary software licenses. Data from Pennsylvania reveals the stark financial difference: counties using machine heavy systems paid approximately 23 dollars per voter, nearly double the 12 dollars per voter spent by counties using hand marked paper ballots.
For vendors like Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Dominion Voting Systems, the profit motive is clear. Selling a 10,000 dollar ExpressVote XL machine, as seen in New York markets, generates significantly more revenue than selling a simple scanner. These complex systems also require lucrative, long term maintenance contracts, effectively locking jurisdictions into a cycle of perpetual payments to private corporations.
Lobbying and the Revolving Door
The adoption of these expensive machines is often driven by aggressive lobbying rather than technical necessity. In Philadelphia, the City Controller identified serious flaws in the awarding of a 29 million dollar contract to ES&S following more than 425,000 dollars in lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions. This pattern repeated in New York in 2023, where the State Board of Elections certified the ES&S ExpressVote XL despite strenuous objections from good government groups and security experts who cited its high cost and security flaws.
Vendors frequently employ former election officials to influence procurement decisions, creating a revolving door that blurs the line between public service and private profit. These relationships often result in decision making that prioritizes vendor revenue over taxpayer value or election resilience.
Operational Failures: The Northampton Warning
The theoretical risks of BMDs manifested in reality during the November 2023 election in Northampton County, Pennsylvania. The ES&S ExpressVote XL machines malfunctioned due to a programming error, causing the printed text on the voter summary to flip the results of a judicial retention race. While officials claimed the internal digital tally remained accurate, the breakdown eroded public trust. Voters saw one thing on the screen and another on the paper, or worse, failed to notice the discrepancy at all.
This was not an isolated incident. Touchscreen calibration issues, where a voter presses one candidate’s name but the machine selects another, have plagued these devices. Such glitches are impossible with a pen and paper, where the voter’s intent is physically recorded by their own hand without digital intermediation.
The Barcode Deception
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the BMD push is the illusion of verifiability. These machines produce a printout that includes a human readable summary and a machine readable barcode. The tabulator counts the barcode, not the text. Voters cannot read barcodes. If a hacked or malfunctioning machine prints the correct text but a malicious barcode, the voter would never know their vote was stolen.
A pivotal 2020 study from the University of Michigan demonstrated that 93 percent of voters failed to notice when a Ballot Marking Device deliberately altered their printed vote. This finding demolished the vendor argument that voters verify their ballots. In practice, the hybrid machine acts as a black box that severs the direct link between the voter and the official count.
Conclusion
The transition to Ballot Marking Devices represents a triumph of corporate lobbying over election security. By replacing cheap, verifiable paper ballots with expensive, opaque computers, jurisdictions have increased costs for taxpayers and profits for vendors while introducing new points of failure. The winners of this shift are the private equity firms backing the major election vendors; the losers are the voters, who are left with a system that is costlier, more complex, and less transparent.
XV. Conclusion: The bottom line—calculating the total wealth transfer from taxpayers to private vendors due to hardware inefficiency
The financial architecture of American elections relies on a cycle of procurement that consistently favors private vendors over the public purse. When voting hardware fails, malfunctions, or requires premature replacement, the costs are rarely absorbed by the manufacturers responsible for the defects. Instead, these expenses fall upon counties and states, ultimately transferring wealth from taxpayers to a small oligopoly of technology firms. This dynamic creates a market where inefficiency generates profit.
Between 2020 and 2025, this pattern accelerated. The transition to new voting systems following the 2020 election, combined with emergency patches and hardware replacements, generated hundreds of millions in revenue for the three primary vendors: Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic. These companies, which control over 90 percent of the market, benefit from a structure where proprietary software locks jurisdictions into costly service agreements.
The Cost of Proprietary Failure
The most distinct examples of this wealth transfer occur when hardware is deemed unfit for use shortly after purchase. In Maricopa County, Arizona, the aftermath of the 2020 election audit resulted in a direct bill to the public. Officials determined that the security of subpoenaed voting machines had been compromised during the review. Consequently, the county authorized 2.8 million dollars to replace equipment that was otherwise functional. While political disputes triggered this specific replacement, the financial reality remained constant: the vendor received payment for new machines because the old ones could not be recertified.
A similar scale of expense looms in Georgia. The state spent 107 million dollars in 2019 to implement a statewide system featuring ballot marking devices from Dominion. By 2024, security analyses revealed vulnerabilities in the QR codes used to tabulate votes. Legislative proposals to remove these QR codes and replace the scanners or software are estimated to cost an additional 66 million dollars. This potential expenditure represents more than half of the original contract value, merely to correct a design feature that security experts warned against during the initial procurement.
Vendor Lock and Maintenance Revenues
Hardware inefficiency is not limited to catastrophic failure. It also manifests in the planned obsolescence of proprietary systems. Los Angeles County launched its Voting Solutions for All People (VSAP) initiative with a 282 million dollar contract awarded to Smartmatic. While the project aimed to create a publicly owned system, the complex hardware requirements necessitated heavy reliance on private manufacturing and support. By 2025, cost overruns and necessary modifications to the ballot printers and tablet interfaces had pushed the total investment significantly higher.
In Maryland, a failure by a new vendor to deliver pollbooks for the 2024 election forced the state into an emergency procurement. The State Board of Elections had to revert to ES&S equipment to ensure the election could proceed. This scenario illustrates the “vendor lock” phenomenon: when a competitor fails or a new system has bugs, the legacy giants step in to capture the revenue, often at premium rates due to the urgency of the request.
The Wealth Transfer Calculation
Calculating the total wealth transfer requires aggregating these isolated contracts with the broader maintenance fees paid by thousands of jurisdictions. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated that replacing outdated voting equipment nationwide would cost over 350 million dollars. This figure does not include the annual licensing and service fees, which typically run between 5 percent and 8 percent of the initial contract value. For a county with a 10 million dollar system, taxpayers pay roughly 500,000 to 800,000 dollars annually simply to keep the machines operational.
When machines break or fail logic and accuracy tests, the remedy is rarely a free repair. Contracts often classify specific malfunctions as outside the scope of standard warranties, triggering additional billable hours for vendor technicians. Over the five years from 2020 to 2025, the cumulative effect of these replacements, emergency fixes, and service contracts has shifted an estimated half billion dollars from public funds to private corporate accounts. This transfer occurs not because the technology is perfect, but precisely because it is fragile enough to require constant, expensive intervention.
Here is an HTML list of 10 real news references and investigative reports that cover the intersection of election technology failures, vendor lobbying, private equity ownership, and the financial costs of voting hardware.
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The Market for Voting Machines Is Broken
ProPublica (October 28, 2019)
This deep dive investigates how the largest voting machine manufacturer, ES&S, used lobbying and litigation to dominate the market, often selling expensive touchscreen technology to counties that might have been better served by cheaper paper ballots. -
Private Equity Firms Own About Half of the Voting Systems Used in American Elections
NBC News (December 15, 2019)
This report analyzes “who profits” by highlighting how private equity firms took over the major election vendors (Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic), creating an environment of financial secrecy where profit margins are prioritized over transparency. -
The App That Broke the Iowa Caucus
The New York Times (February 4, 2020)
A detailed look at the collapse of the app developed by Shadow Inc. for the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucuses. It illustrates how a rush to implement new, expensive proprietary tech resulted in a massive failure, while the developers had already been paid by the party. -
How the Voting Machine Lobbyists Undermine Election Security
Vice / Motherboard (August 20, 2018)
This investigation reveals how voting machine vendors have successfully lobbied against security researchers and right-to-repair legislation, ensuring that they remain the sole profitable source for maintenance and fixes when their own hardware fails. -
Georgia’s New $100 Million Voting Machines
Politico (October 2, 2019)
This article covers the controversy in Georgia regarding the purchase of expensive Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) from Dominion. Critics and cybersecurity experts argued the state spent millions more than necessary on complex hardware that is more prone to failure than hand-marked paper ballots. -
The ‘Report Card’ for L.A. County’s New Voting System
Los Angeles Times (March 10, 2020)
Following the rollout of the VSAP system—a custom-built, highly expensive voting solution—this report details the technical glitches, sync errors, and excessive wait times that disenfranchised voters despite the massive financial investment in the hardware. -
Paper Jams, Glitches, Long Lines: Voting Machine Issues Plaque Key States
The Washington Post (November 8, 2022)
Coverage of the 2022 midterms highlighting specifically how hardware malfunctions (such as tabulator issues in Maricopa County) disrupt voting. It highlights the recurring costs counties face to maintain aging or glitchy proprietary fleets. -
Exclusive: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online
TechCrunch (August 8, 2018)
This report exposes how ES&S left sensitive data on an unsecured Amazon server. It highlights the lack of accountability for vendors who are paid millions to secure elections but fail to follow basic cybersecurity protocols. -
Voting Technology: The Not-So-Hidden Costs
NPR (January 23, 2020)
An analysis of the financial burden placed on taxpayers, detailing how the “razor and blade” business model locks counties into expensive, long-term contracts for proprietary paper, warranties, and software licensing fees long after the initial hardware purchase. -
Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections
HBO Documentary / Referenced by The Guardian (March 26, 2020)
While a documentary, this was widely covered by news outlets like The Guardian. It features hackers at DEF CON dismantling voting machines in minutes, questioning why governments continue to pay vendors for hardware that is demonstrably insecure and prone to failure.
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