National Post (National Edition)
From Canadian success to conspiracy theory
`Dominion is running our election. Rigged!'
From their headquarters on Toronto's Spadina Avenue, John Poulos and James Hoover started small but grew quickly.
The company they founded, Dominion Voting Systems, began as a two-man operation in the wake of a balloting snafu that left the 2000 U.S. presidential election in disarray.
Marketing more advanced, technology-driven ways of counting votes in America, Canada and elsewhere, they expanded within a few years a whopping 10,000 per cent. In the process, Dominion became a key piece of the democratic machinery in the world's most powerful nation.
It's a Canadian success story, though now American-owned, and this month it met head-on with a mounting U.S. phenomenon.
Dominion has for days been the target of baseless allegations of rigged vote counting, propagated first by the QAnon conspiracy movement and far-right media, and now by President Donald Trump and his chief lawyer.
“It's … a very, very dangerous foreign company that did the votes in 27 states, a company that's not American, a company that's foreign,” lawyer Rudolph Giuliani told Fox News on the weekend.
“Dominion is running our election. Rigged!” tweeted Trump.
Media outlets across the United States have methodically dismantled the theory that Dominion somehow neglected to count or flipped 2.7 million Trump votes. And more importantly, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security branch that oversees election security, part of the Trump administration, has debunked it.
The attacks have fuelled concerns that the president is needlessly undermining a long-held trust in American democracy. For a Canadian startup, majority-owned since 2018 by a New York investment firm, the allegations could be just as serious.
“It’s high stakes from a business perspective for there to be fraud allegations,” said Aleksander Essex, a computer science professor at Western University who studies election security. “There are people that were talking to me today that were worried about Dominion being able to continue, to exist. That they could go out of business.”
Dominion officials could not be reached for comment Monday.
Essex and other election-security experts who have long warned about the weaknesses of electronic voting equipment are quick to stress there is no evidence to support the president’s claims of a massive vote fraud by Dominion.
“There is a difference between a vulnerability and a rigged election, they’re completely different things,” said the Western professor. “You don’t just get to say it’s rigged. You need to have something, anything, to back that up.”
The theories abounding online around Dominion are “nonsense,” agreed Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer science professor. Indeed, the election was conducted with unusual care after Trump’s “blathering about rigged elections” led to intense scrutiny from both parties, he said.
But both Essex and Jones say the industry as a whole has been lackadaisical about security, making itself open to digital assault from outside actors and even those within the business.
Dominion both produces the kind of ballot scanning and counting equipment and software used extensively in the U.S. election, and systems for Internet voting that have been adopted in numerous Canadian municipalities.
Ballots cast in federal elections in Canada are still counted by hand, part of a system that Essex believes is the best in the world.
Dominion made Deloitte’s list of 50 fastest-growing Canadian technology firms five separate years, while Poulos himself was chosen as one of Canada’s top 40 under 40 in 2010.
The company now serves 1,200 jurisdictions just in the U.S., and is that country’s second-biggest elections equipment vendor.
But it has often met with controversy, working in a field that necessarily attracts massive media and public scrutiny.
Dominion was on the hot seat in 2014 when a glitch in its system meant lengthy delays in announcing the results of the New Brunswick provincial election.
Then in 2018, 42 Ontario municipalities had to extend voting by 24 hours when another Dominion technical problem all but prevented voters from accessing the online balloting site for hours.
Essex produced a report on that calamity and came away dismayed by the vulnerability of the system, and at the company’s lack of transparency — typical of an industry he said is secretive as a whole.
He said he heard from numerous losing candidates for mayor and councillor who were concerned that the problems had led to an unfair election, at least one of whom tried but failed to get information from Dominion itself.
“All of this in Ontario simmered under the radar,” said Essex about the industry’s opaqueness.
Jones said Dominion is no better or worse than any of the major vendors, but all have been too lax in securing their systems, both from tampering by malign national actors like Russia, China and Iran — and from technicians inside.
“I don’ t want a system that is vulnerable to a takeover by some cabal of bureaucrats,” he said. “The motivation through almost all of the development (of election technology) was focusing on the user experience, the voter’s experience and also on the elections officials’ experience. With extraordinary little attention to security.”