ES&S is America’s most obviously concerning voting machine vendor

In September 2020, a Texas examiner’s report said there was a “ bug” in ES&S’s hash verification script. What happened after is unknown.

By Jennifer Cohn
12/21/20

First, a cautionary note. Close partisan associations and corruption involving voting machine vendors are inappropriate, and significant discrepancies between polling and official outcomes are unnerving and fair game for reporting, as are voting-system vulnerabilities and the many electronic “glitches” that occur in elections. But they do not prove fraud. Moreover, we cannot typically prove that election outcomes are wrong without conducting robust manual audits using hand marked paper ballots (with an exception for voters with disabilities). This is why the Democrats proposed the SAFE Act, which would have required robust manual audits for all federal races this year and banned most of the touchscreen voting machines currently in use. It also would have banned internet connectivity to voting systems. But the GOP killed the SAFE Act.

Republicans nonetheless have the audacity to complain after the election about lack of security and…