Dominion Voting Systems, which was at the center of 2020’s false election claims, has been sold to a former Republican election official.

Voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems (DVS), which was founded in Toronto and was the target of conspiracy theories in the 2020 US presidential election spread by Republican Donald Trump and his allies, has been sold.

Dominion, which has operated in Denver for the past several years, has been purchased by a company run by a former Republican election official, its new company announced Thursday.

The acquisition represents a remarkable turn of events from just over two years ago. In April 2023, with the defamation trial looming, Fox and Fox News agreed to pay US$787.5 million in a settlement and said it “acknowledged court rulings that found certain claims about Dominion to be false” in post-election coverage across its news sites.

Heading into 2025, Dominion still has pending lawsuits for a similar cause against a handful of individuals and entities, but according to a report Thursday in Axios, it has reached undisclosed settlements with former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani and One America News Network. Dominion had declined to comment in late September to CNN when it learned through a court filing that the lawsuit with Giuliani had been settled.

New company ‘dedicated to restoring trust’

KnowInk, a St. Louis-based provider of e-poll books that allow election officials to confirm voter information, announced the deal and changed the company name to Liberty Vote.

The ad also quotes KnowInk’s owner, former St. Louis elections director Scott Leyendecker, pledging to provide “election technology that prioritizes paper-based transparency,” a long-standing demand of election conspiracy theorists.

Almost all voting equipment in the United States, including that provided by Dominion, It actually leaves a paper trail.

Canadian John Boles, former CEO of Dominion, confirmed the sale in a one-sentence statement Thursday: “Dominion Voting Systems has been acquired by Liberty Vote.”

While Paul still had a stake in the company he helped found, the private equity firm Staple Street Capital, in 2018, acquired a significant controlling stake In a deal worth 38 million US dollars.

All internet traffic to Dominion’s former website, including fact checks about its technology and 2020 voting, is now redirected to freedomvote.com. In a statement signed on the website by Leyendecker, referred to as its founder and chairman, the company says it is “100 percent American-owned” and “dedicated to restoring trust in our elections.”

The new company’s announcement did not reveal the cost of the deal, but a spokesman told the Associated Press that all the money was provided by Leyendecker. KnowInk and Liberty Vote are privately owned.

Machines used in regional and municipal elections

pAulus, an electrical engineering graduate of the University of Toronto, started the company with partner James Hoover three years after the 2000 US presidential election — when paper ballot results led to “Chad is hanging“And disputes in the critical swing state of Florida.”

A US Supreme Court decision It ultimately led to a Republican victory, but there were also disagreements, albeit smaller ones, with Diebold voting machines in the 2004 presidential election.

Information about how Dominion machines worked was widely available by the 2020 election, as Paul testified before government committees across North America. Although Dominion is not used at the federal level by Elections Canada, it has been used in a number of provincial and municipal elections.

Many Trump supporters and Republican officials were stunned when Joe Biden tallied 81 million votes to win the 2020 election, and were particularly angry about the counting of votes after the November 3 election date. Trump prematurely declared himself the winner on Election Night and collected more votes as they were counted in the early hours and days, but Biden’s total surpassed his own in a vote held as the COVID-19 pandemic raged and vaccines were not yet available.

But recounts, reviews and audits in battleground states where his loss was in doubt all confirmed Biden’s victory. Judges, including some appointed by Trump, rejected dozens of his legal challenges.

Allegations have spread about Dominion and Smartmatic, another voting technology company. Powell posted Strange theory Dominion’s origins were in Venezuela, and it had links to the late autocrat Hugo Chavez.

One subsequent study He concluded that post-election audits “changed the net presidential vote count by only about 0.007 percent.”

The former election official was targeted

Chris Krebs, a Trump appointee who headed the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), called the November 2020 election “the most secure in American history.” It was He was fired weeks laterLast April, it was revealed that Trump had signed guidance notes for the Department of Justice To investigate KrebsFor unspecified reasons.

William Barr, the attorney general at the time of the election and up until that point a staunch Trump defender, told The Associated Press in December 2020 that there was no evidence of widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the election. Barr later told a congressional committee that the allegations were “nonsense.”

However, a large number of Trump supporters descended on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory.

At the time of the 2020 vote, counties in more than 20 states in the decentralized US election administration system used Dominion machines.

Trump, in his second non-consecutive term as president, continues to insist that the vote five years ago was “rigged.” Trump’s victories in the 2016 and 2024 elections also occurred with the use of Dominion’s technology across many jurisdictions.

There has never been a coherent explanation for how vote totals skewed the presidential race alone while congressional and gubernatorial races and countless other races on the 2020 ballot were unaffected or contested without incident.

In 2023, Paul said 60 minutes These allegations exposed the company’s employees to threats and harassment via email and phone. One of its former employees He won a civil trial in Julywhere a federal jury found that staunch Trump ally Mike Lindell, founder of MyPillow, defamed him.

Smartmatic has also filed defamation lawsuits against a number of Republican individuals and entities over the 2020 election.

Release from Liberty Vote pledges to reintroduce “hand-marked paper ballots” and amend company policies to follow Trump’s recent executive order on voting procedures

Part of the president’s order sought to ban voting equipment that produces a paper record containing a “bar code or QR code” — equipment currently in use in hundreds of counties across 19 states, according to an Associated Press report.

Trump’s executive order has been challenged by the state’s Democratic attorneys general, the Democratic National Committee and numerous civil rights and voting organizations.