Voter ID, voter fraud, voting manipulation. These things are front and center in the news. And for good reason. The 2020 election was a fiasco sowing distrust in half of the voting population.
Here in Minnesota the voting seemed to go as normal. But, did it? The voting machines we use are the same machines currently under forensic audit in Arizona. And, it’s not like our representation hasn’t questioned the manipulation of these machines.
Democrats have raised concerns about voting machine companies in the past. Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar are examples of Democrats who have done so.
Warren and Klobuchar co-signed letters sent to investors of the three major voting systems used in the U.S. last December, including a Dominion investor. A letter sent to the managing directors of the private equity firm Staple Street Capital Group LLC, which was also signed by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, requested information on what the nature of the firm's financial relationship with Dominion was.
The letter drew attention to a handful of incidents during the 2018 midterm elections in which voters reported that the machines they used switched their votes, raising concerns about the machines' security and the importance of updating voting machine technology whenever possible.
Several years earlier, Maloney raised concerns about Smartmatic's purchase of a different voting machine company based in the U.S. called Sequoia Voting Systems. In a 2006 news release, Maloney identified Smartmatic as a company with "possible ties to the Venezuelan government," citing how Venezuela tapped the company to assist with a recall election in 2004.
Minnesota deserves to have complete and unquestionable confidence in our voting systems and process.
