I'd like your permission of you and your fine audience that as I answer you that I have your permission to piss you off... The very minute that order went through and that order was followed, and all the legal notices were done, it didn't even take four hours later where moving trucks with this stuff was backed up to those buildings trying to get rid of the evidence.

The GOP's apparent blind spot for problems involving ES&S is curious. Before the GOP began screaming "Dominion, Dominion, Dominion," most of the negative press about the elections industry in the U.S. had for years focused on ES&S. And for good reason.

[...]

Beginning in 2015, ES&S began quietly installing cellular modems in precinct ballot scanners in some counties in swing states such as Florida and Michigan. At some point, it added them in some counties in Wisconsin, Illinois, and beyond. As reported by Kim Zetter earlier this year, these modems connect both the scanners and the receiving end systems to the internet, but officials claimed otherwise. ES&S systems containing modems were never certified by the Election Assistance Commission, but ES&S falsely implied to its customers that they were, as further reported by Zetter this year.

It was on ES&S's watch that 127,000 votes vanished from Diebold machines in predominantly African American precincts in Georgia during the 2018 midterm elections, as reported in the Root. (By then, the Department of Justice had forced ES&S to dissolve Diebold, its subsidiary, on anti-trust grounds, but ES&S had kept most of its contracts.)

Since 2013, ES&S has donated $30,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee whose mission is to elect Republicans to state office. It may also have donated to the Democratic corollary of RSLC, but I've been unable to confirm this. A few years ago, ES&S donated to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), who then killed proposed election-security legislation.

ES&S has also provided secret donations and other gifts to state and county election officials who, in the past few years, have then chosen ES&S's insecure new touchscreen systems for use by most in-person voters.

By choosing these new ES&S touchscreen systems, which are called ballot marking devices, officials ignored the advice of election-security experts who recommended hand marked paper ballots instead. In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where an ES&S representative had assured election officials that "miscalibration" would not be an issue with its new touchscreens ("Scouts honor," he said), dozens of the county's new ES&S touchscreens were miscalibrated during an election in 2019. Similar problems occurred in neighboring Philadelphia, whose decision makers (which included a Democrat and a Republican) had each received donations from ES&S lobbyists before choosing the system. I compiled much of the national news regarding ES&S corruption and its new touchscreen voting machines here.

This article by Greg Gordon at McClatchy exposed ES&S's corrupt advisory board for county and state officials — including officials in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and New York — which recently disbanded due to the media fallout from Gordon's piece. One former board member was South Carolina's election director Marci Andino. In 2018, South Carolina reported that "Andino had accepted nearly $20,000 in expenses during her decade as an adviser for ... [ES&S]." The state went on to buy new ES&S systems for use throughout the state.

In 2017, a cybersecurity firm called Upguard discovered that ES&S had leaked 1.8 million Chicago voter records. ES&S, which acknowledged and corrected the leak, said the data "contained names, addresses, birthdates, partial social security numbers and some driver's license and state ID numbers stored in backup files on a server."

In 2018, as reported by Zetter, ES&S finally admitted, despite prior denials that it had installed remote access software in election management systems (which include county tabulators that compile precinct totals) sold between 2000 and 2006. ES&S later told NPR that it had 300 remote-access customers. It refused, however, to identify those customers. It claims the software has been removed but won't say when it was removed.

[...]

This Verified Voting map from a few years ago shows in orange all states that use ES&S election equipment in at least some counties — either precinct machines or central count scanners. (Georgia has since switched to Dominion, perhaps due to the vanishing black votes scandal with ES&S/Diebold in 2018.) As you can see, ES&S's influence over U.S. elections is staggering. (I would provide an updated map but the last time I checked, Verified Voting's tool no longer included this function. I believe the only major change is Georgia's switch to Dominion from ES&S. I'm told that California may no longer use ES&S at all — up until a few years ago, they still used ES&S for vote by mail in some places.)

Which raises the question again. Why are Republicans ignoring ES&S? Texas's corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton, recently went so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to overturn other states' elections.Meanwhile, he has ignored that ES&S voting systems in his own state had a security "bug" as of September 2020 that could in theory have allowed the installation of unauthorized software.

• "99.99% accuracy rate" Raffensperger says signature match audit found no evidence of voter fraud in Cobb County - Only 2 out of 15,118 signatures identified as problem
• Georgia Secretary Of State opens 250 investigations into 'credible claims of illegal voting' - while being sued for 'weakening' ballot safeguards
• Georgia state senator's report: Coordinated illegal actions appear to have taken place during election

• Forbes asks: 'Was Israel responsible for the Beirut explosion?'
• HUGE cache of weapons made in US, Israel, Turkey & Gulf states abandoned by terrorists in recently liberated area of Syria
• Sensitive US military equipment given to local forces in Afghanistan goes missing