Omaha City Wire

Since the 2016 presidential elections when Russia was suspected of tampering with the outcome, many are calling for the companies that design voting machines to be more transparent about the software used and the origins of the parts used to build the machines.

Omaha-based Electronic Systems & Software LLC (ES&S), a company that plays a central role in U.S. elections has been under increased scrutiny by a growing fear that hackers – either domestic or international –  may be able to tamper with the software used for the voting machines. 

As a result, ES&S and its competitors like Dominion Voting Systems and Hart Intercivic have been forced to reveal details about their ownership and from where they source their parts for their machines. The answer to the latter part of that question is China.

Jim Bleck, who pioneered the very first computer voting machine, said the idea of the U.S. sourcing parts for voting machines from China is a far cry from how the industry operated decades ago when he was designing voting machines.

At that time, companies were rewarded for manufacturing parts in the U.S., Bleck said.

“There was a point sometime in the 2000s where that whole idea that the voting machines would be manufactured in the US and then on your contract application, you would get points for [U.S] sourcing and that just kind of drifted away,” he said.

Bleck said many companies may be more concerned about their bottom line than they are about where they source their machine parts.

“This stuff all costs a lot of money,” he said. “So if you were to build a voting machine and use off-the-shelf stuff now, you could build it [for] 25, 30 percent of all the things that we were doing.”

The voting machine industry is not regulated as heavily as many feel it should be. While using computer voting machines are convenient and come with a host of benefits, they create security concerns that have prompted a demand for machines to produce a paper record for each vote.