The announcement last week that a former Republican election official had purchased Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems and given it the new name Liberty Vote took many county clerks in the state by surprise.
Unaffiliated clerk Tiffany Lee from La Plata County in southwest Colorado said she had no advance warning about the sale from Dominion or Liberty Vote.
“There was no notification to us that this was even a conversation at their level,” said Lee. Like other clerks she found out through the media and Liberty Vote’s press release.
“That's concerning to me that we didn't get any kind of information from them directly or Dominion,” she said.
Sixty of Colorado’s 64 counties had contracts with Dominion for the technology they use to scan and count paper ballots. Since the 2020 election, the company has been a major target of discredited conspiracy theories, accusing its equipment of manipulating the vote.
A press release announcing the sale highlighted Liberty Vote’s 100 percent American ownership and a mission to “restore public confidence in the electoral process through transparent, secure, and trustworthy voting systems, including the use of hand-marked paper ballots.” The company’s new CEO, Scott Leiendecker, promised to comply with President Trump’s executive order on election security (Colorado is part of a lawsuit arguing the order is unconstitutional).
That kind of language, coupled with the fact that Leiendecker is a former Republican election official from Missouri, raised questions for some of her county’s voters, according to Lee.
“It was, ‘Is this a GOP takeover? Are elections going away? What’s happening?’” she said. Probably one of the biggest questions I've overall gotten is, ‘Are we gonna continue to have elections?’”
She assured those voters that there will still be free and fair elections. Lee and other Colorado election officials are urging calm in the wake of the sale.
“From a security and technical perspective, everything still stands,” said Democratic Boulder County Clerk Molly Fitzpatrick, who talked with Leiendecker shortly after the sale and helped facilitate another call with every clerk in the state. “We still have multiple layers of security. We still have multiple checks and balances to demonstrate and verify integrity of the system. Everything that we have been saying for years is still the same.”
“He reiterated that he is an elections person and he has a long track record of being involved in elections,” said Fitzpatrick.
Colorado is a paper ballot state, and by law, all Colorado counties conduct risk-limiting audits after each election, double-checking the scanning machines’ tallies against the actual votes on the original paper ballots. While audits of election results and hand counts have shown the state’s election results are accurate, the state has been at the epicenter of false election claims.
“All of the mis- and disinformation certainly raises anxiety around this. And then when you see media reports that the new ownership is MAGA, so on and so forth, what does that mean?” said Matt Crane, the Executive Director of the Colorado County Clerks Association and a former Republican Arapahoe County clerk. He said concerns about the vision of the new ownership aren’t surprising, expected given the pressure election officials have been under since the 2020 presidential election.
“Does that mean he's like a Mike Lindell crazy, who thinks that we should go back to the Stone Age and have less secure and less accurate elections by hand counting ballots?”
Crane has talked to Leiendecker in recent days and said he’s been transparent and allayed many of the clerks’ concerns.
“It really is, ‘everybody just take a deep breath, everything is gonna be great moving forward,’ and they can expect to have the same high-quality, accessible, and secure elections and accurate elections that Coloradans have come to expect.”
Crane said it adds credibility that Leinendecker is also the CEO of a separate election company, KNOWiNK, which provides electronic poll books to help states manage their voter rolls. Crane said Colorado doesn’t use the company because the state built its own digital poll book years ago, but he’s heard good things about KNOWiNK.
“He's approaching this as a former election official,” Crane said.
Twenty-six states have been using Dominion technology, contracts that now move to Liberty Vote. Leiendecker is the sole owner of the new company and privately financed the purchase. He has not released any details of the deal, including how much he paid for the company.
Dominion’s value has been a point of debate as it’s pursued damages in various election conspiracy defamation trials. A report it commissioned found it would have been worth nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars after the 2020 election, if not for damage to its reputation, but its court opponents have disputed that figure.
Liberty Vote said Leiendecker intends to maintain the Denver office and staffing presence.
Clerks told CPR News it’s too soon to tell whether the sale of Dominion may quell some of the concerns on the right about vote tabulation machines. Dominion and one of its former employees have been subject to countless baseless claims and conspiracies that the company’s machines stole the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.
Republican Weld County Clerk Carly Koppes points to the conspiracy amplified by Trump allies that Dominion, which was founded in Toronto, created its software at the direction of former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez to steal elections.
“Now they can't say, ‘oh, well, you know, these things were connected to Venezuela.’ We've heard that, how many times?” said Koppes. “Now it's like, ‘no, actually, this is a fully-owned-within-the-U.S. company now.’ So it will, you know, obviously knock down some of those narratives.”
But Koppes also notes that, in spite of the courts, election audits, and local election officials consistently debunking all of the false claims, it doesn’t necessarily make any difference. She said while the sale may ease some people’s concerns on the right, she thinks those deeply enmeshed in election conspiracies will not be swayed.
Indeed, after the sale was announced, conservative activist and podcaster Joe Oltmann, a prominent election denier based in Colorado, blasted the CEO of Liberty Vote in a Facebook post.
“This guy is not a conservative... I truly hate what our country has become ... it is literally a cartel that wear different badges while stealing the voice in a sea of treason,” posted Oltmann.
But Oltmann’s attack on this new incarnation of Dominion, and its CEO, provided comfort for some in the election world. As one Colorado election official quipped, if an election denier like Oltmann is criticizing the company, “they must be doing something right.”
