Dominion Voting Systems

Overview

The name on the door is gone. On October 9, 2025, Dominion Voting Systems was acquired by an entity called Liberty Vote, and the company’s own press release declared: “As of today, Dominion is gone” — with Liberty Vote assuming “full ownership and operational control” and dominionvoting.com redirecting to libertyvote.com (NPR). That sentence is the least-shared fact about Dominion. Most biographies still describe the company in the present tense, as the voting-machine maker at the center of the 2020 election fight. The present-tense version is out of date: the brand that spent five years as a conspiracy-theory target and two years as a defamation plaintiff has been retired.

The buyer adds the twist. Liberty Vote was founded by Scott Leiendecker, described by NPR as a onetime St. Louis Republican election director who founded an election technology company broadly used by election officials (NPR). Boulder County’s clerk, whose county has used Dominion equipment since 2017, identified him in her October 14, 2025 statement as the “Founder and Chairman of Liberty Vote” (Boulder County). The company that the Trump movement spent years accusing of stealing an election is now run by a man from the Republican election-administration world — and the announcement spoke the movement’s language, calling the acquisition “a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America” while committing to hand-marked paper ballots and compliance with the president’s executive order (NPR).

A Canadian-founded company in 28 states

Dominion Voting Systems Corp. was a Canadian-founded company with its international headquarters in Toronto, founded by John Poulos, its president and CEO, and James Hoover, its vice president, with offices in Toronto and in Colorado (IndiaPost). Its US arm, Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., was founded in 2009 in Colorado (IndiaPost). By the 2020 election, the company said its technology covered 40% of the US electorate and was used in 28 states (IndiaPost). Its subsidiaries included Premier Election Solutions and Sequoia Voting Systems, both acquired voting-technology businesses (IndiaPost).

The ownership structure that mattered later was private equity: Bloomberg reporting cited two directors of the US company, Stephen Owens and Hootan Yaghoobzadeh, as co-founders of Staple Street Capital, which held the majority stake (IndiaPost). Staple Street had taken that position in 2018 — the ownership that would eventually sell to Liberty Vote.

The false claims and the debunking

After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and allies including Rudy Giuliani falsely blamed Dominion and its machines for rigging the vote against Trump (NPR). The fallout was personal: the baseless claims caused one of Dominion’s executives to go into hiding in 2020 (NPR). At issue was whether Denver-based Dominion’s ballot-counting machines were used to manipulate the presidential election in favor of Joe Biden — a claim with no supporting evidence (Reuters).

Contemporaneous reporting recorded the official rebuttals as they happened. In Michigan, inaccuracies in reporting the votes were discovered but officials said they were due to human error, not the Dominion software (IndiaPost). In Georgia, officials said Dominion software problems delayed the reporting of vote counts but did not affect the numbers (IndiaPost). The claims also tried to tie Dominion to Smartmatic, a rival election-technology company — Smartmatic issued a statement saying it had “never owned any shares or had any financial stake in Dominion” and that the two were “competitors in the marketplace” (IndiaPost). And for the record, Elections Canada tweeted that it did not use Dominion at all: the country counts paper ballots by hand in front of scrutineers (IndiaPost).

The $787.5 million settlement

Dominion filed its defamation suit against Fox in 2021, seeking $1.6 billion in damages (Reuters). On April 18, 2023, Fox News and Fox Corp settled for $787.5 million, averting a trial in Wilmington, Delaware, where the jury had been selected that same day (Reuters). Legal experts called it the largest settlement struck by an American media company; the previous record was Disney’s $177 million “pink slime” settlement with ABC’s Beef Products in 2017 (Reuters).

Dominion CEO John Poulos called the settlement “historic” and said Fox had “admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company, our employees and our customers” (Reuters). For its part, Fox said it acknowledged “the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and framed the deal as a decision to resolve the dispute “amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial” (Reuters). The settlement spared Fox’s best-known figures from testifying — including Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro — though February court filings had already shown Murdoch privately acknowledging the vote-rigging claims were false and admitting under oath that some hosts “endorsed” them (Reuters).

The sale — and a clerk’s unease

The October 2025 sale landed on customers who had spent years defending the equipment. Boulder County Clerk Molly Fitzpatrick posted her statement on October 14, noting the county had used Dominion equipment since 2017 and laying out the safeguards: paper ballots retained for 25 months as official records, bipartisan pre-election testing teams, tightly controlled multi-agency software upgrades, and equipment not connected to the internet (Boulder County).

What makes her statement unusual is its candor about the new owner’s announcement. She wrote that when Liberty Vote’s release referenced Trump’s executive order, third-party audits, and paper ballots, she — “like many” — was concerned about the rhetoric, since those talking points had “often been used to promote false claims about elections” (Boulder County). She then described two meetings with Leiendecker within two business days — once with Front Range clerks, once statewide — in which clerks asked “tough, direct questions about his intentions, his public statements, and his reasons for acquiring Dominion” (Boulder County). Her verdict: his answers were open and satisfactory, his decades in election technology showed commitment, and while she did not support the press-release language, she appreciated “his intention to reach those who have doubts” (Boulder County). She closed by calling alarmist claims that the acquisition means elections will be “rigged” “irresponsible and unfounded” (Boulder County).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not give Dominion a founding year — sources differ between 2002 and 2003 and no tier-1 or tier-2 page read in full confirmed one. It does not state the sale price, which was never publicly disclosed. It does not claim the vote-rigging allegations had any evidentiary basis — the sources read here document the claims’ falsity, the human-error explanations for Michigan, and the Georgia recount record. It does not predict what Liberty Vote will do with the equipment, software, or existing contracts; the only verified post-sale customer view is Boulder County’s. And it treats Fox’s “acknowledgment” of the court’s rulings as what it was — a settlement statement, not an admission of liability beyond what the rulings themselves found.