Who Owns Indiana’s Voting Machines?
The question of who owns voting machines and the software they run on has resurfaced since the Nov. 3 election with the Trump campaign pointing fingers at Smartmatic, which was started by three Venezuelans. One company that has escaped scrutiny thus far is Hart InterCivic, the third-largest maker of voting machines in the United States, which makes the voting machines used in seven Indiana counties: Cass, Gibson, Harrison, Monroe, Ohio, Washington and Wayne, as well as several counties in southern Michigan, two in Pennsylvania and many in California and Texas. Hart InterCivic, unbeknownst to . . . pretty much everybody . . . was recently acquired by an investment company founded by the son of Clinton associate Strobe Talbott, who helped distribute the Steele dossier – seen by many on the Right as a concocted effort to tie President Donald Trump to the Russian government and to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election. Why this was not announced anywhere will surely be a topic for conversation going forward, and perhaps result in a push for more transparency about the ownership of machines that count the votes and determine the winners in every American election.
A little background on Hart InterCivic: The company is based in Austin, Texas, and was founded in 1912 as a commercial printer involved in printing ballots for Texas counties. In the 1990s, Hart purchased three election-services companies and thus got into the business of manufacturing electronic vote-tallying equipment. In 2011, Hart InterCivic was purchased by a Miami-based private equity firm called HIG and in July was sold to a group backed by Enlightenment Capital. Enlightenment Capital is an investment company founded in 2012 by Devin Talbott, age 44, and defense expert Pierre Chao. It is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C. Devin Talbott is the son of Strobe Talbott, who was ambassador-at-large, Russia advisor and then deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001 and the president of the Brookings Institution, Washington’s premier liberal think tank, from 2002 until 2017. It was recently revealed that a Russian citizen who worked at Brookings under Talbott and went on to work for Christopher Steele – Igor Danchenko – was the main or perhaps the only Russian source of information on Trump and Russia in the Steele dossier. It was also reported that Talbott obtained the dossier from Steele and helped distribute it inside the United States – making him a key figure in the Russia collusion narrative that gripped American politics for much of President Donald Trump’s first three years in office. The son, now the managing director of Enlightenment Capital, has also been politically involved. Devin Talbott made 86 political contributions in this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records, including to the Biden campaign, the Lincoln Project, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee and the Mark Kelly for Senate campaign in Arizona. Devin Talbott did not return calls and messages seeking comment. Hart InterCivic also did not return several calls asking who owns the company and also did not reply to email messages. HIG did reply to emails, confirming they sold Hart InterCivic but said it was to a manager group, and that they were unaware of Enlightenment Capital’s involvement.
https://inpolicy.org/2020/11/menge-who-owns-indianas-voting-machines/
Private equity dominated the 2020 election process
https://www.axios.com/private-equity-dominion-elections-voting-71afa7ff-9a97-4006-96d5-3370afb3bb61.html
Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees
https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election