DoJ Investigation into Diebold Sale to ES&S

I spoke about a Senate panel investigation into this troubling consolidation in the evoting space on my podcast. Now Ars has news of a separate Department of Justice investigation into the same deal. Ars’ source, BlackBoxVoting.org, also mentions over a dozen state level investigations on the same antitrust grounds. This is encouraging as the deal, if it does go through, would result in ES&S controlling 74% of the market.

Vendors of evoting systems have traditionally been very resistant to being held accountable but this kind of market consolidation no doubt would make it far worse. I can only imagine how in such a future requests for source code disclosure or adversarial testing would go, probably just flat out rejection given how little recourse states and the Fed would have otherwise.

Update: Not sure why Ars reported this as an FTC investigation when the source explains it is a Department of Justice investigation.  I have changed the story to reflect that correction.

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