Just two voting machine vendors, ES&S and Dominion Voting, account for more than 80% of US election equipment. Thus, if corrupt insiders or hackers infiltrated either vendor, they could wreak havoc on elections throughout the US. 1/

Until 2010, America's 2 largest vendors were ES&S & Diebold Election Systems. Diebold was called Global until ATM mftr. Diebold, Inc. acquired it in 02. Global's senior VP & largest shareholder was a convicted embezzler whose crimes involved sophisticated computer tampering. 2/

The embezzler at Diebold was discovered & "outed" not by election officials, but rather by election-security advocate and Black Box Voting author @BevHarrisWrites. According to the Guardian, the embezzler programmed 1/3 of the machines used to count votes in 37 states in 04. 3/

Diebold claimed that it had parted ways with the embezzler when Global was acquired in 2002. But @BevHarrisWrites learned that the embezzler had maintained a consulting relationship with Diebold for an unknown period of time after the acquisition. 4/

The CEO of Diebold, Inc., the ATM manufacturer that acquired Global, was a mega donor of George W. Bush. In the run up to the 2004 election, he sent a letter to other potential mega donors promising to deliver the key swing state of Ohio to Bush. Not a good look. 5/

In 09, ES&S acquired Diebold, but the companies were already related in that Diebold's president for many years had founded ES&S w/ his brother who remained at ES&S the whole time. Chuck Schumer got the DOJ 2 force ES&S to dissolve Diebold, but ES&S kept most of its contracts. 6/

ES&S sold some of Diebold’s intellectual property right to Dominion but, having kept most of Diebold’s servicing & maintenance contracts, it maintained its status as America’s largest voting machine vendor, accounting for about 47% of US election equipment. 7/

ES&S has donated $30K to the GOP since 2013, and that's not all... I discuss Dominion and Unisyn in this video too, as well as strategies to minimize threats to our election in November. Here is the whole presentation. 8/

I discuss most of the facts set forth in this thread in this piece on Medium. 9/ https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/americas-electronic-voting-system-is-corrupted-to-the-core-1f55f34f346e

In this piece, I discuss about twenty things we still can and must do to protect the election in November. Most of these strategies are included in the video in post 9 as well. I hope you find this information useful. TY. #ProtectOurVotes 10/ https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/tips-to-mitigate-threats-to-our-votes-and-voter-registrations-before-november-690099f76cf4

My point is NOT that the situation is hopeless. My point is that we, the voters, must take the potential for electronic theft very seriously & do what we can to mitigate threats, which means more than “just” voting in large #s. Pls read the article in post 10. It’s important. 11/

If people don’t understand the threat, they are unlikely to make the effort to do the things that might protect their votes, such as asking to vote with #HandMarkedPaperBallots rather than touchscreens, demanding backup paper everything, & objecting to premature concessions. 12/

And we must insist that FL, MI, WI, & IL remove the cellular modems that ES&S put in precinct ballot scanners starting in 2015. They connect to the internet & there’s time to remove them. @JocelynBenson is a D. Her predecessor stuck them in there but she can remove them. 13/

#RemoveTheModems 14/

We can also tell Trump to STFU when he falsely claims that Ds will “rig the election.” It is Rs that blocked every goddamn effort to reign in these vendors. They blocked the #SAFEAct, which wld have banned internet connectivity & required robust manual audits. 15/

This is completely despicable conduct by Trump and his GOP minions. Throw it back in their faces. Make them prove they didn’t cheat. 16/ https://www.axios.com/gop-senator-election-security-blocks-3f432161-42f4-4fa2-9207-d281ec857058.html

Yes this is a great tip. But how many will do it if they don’t know the situation with the vendors? 17/ https://twitter.com/egrunus/status/1299381435929956353