By Chris Deaton
SPEND SOME TIME AROUND ELECTION PROFESSIONALS, and it becomes clear just how many of them are in it for love of the game. It’s a lot. There’s no putting a percentage on it; no survey that shows how many officials of the country’s 10,000-plus election jurisdictions say “the heartwarming sight of people wearing ‘I Voted!’ stickers” is their preferred reason for doing the job. There is, however, a modal sort of election professional, the type you’re likely to encounter most often: “highly dedicated to every voter, regardless of their political party,” one description might go; someone who will “put fair and honest elections above anything else,” in possession of technical expertise, dispossessed of partisan concerns when it comes to administering the vote, competent and organized. Almost to a word, this is how former colleagues talk about a onetime election official named Scott Leiendecker, who some still remember as “Scottie” despite not keeping in touch.
In a different era, Leiendecker would register approximately zero name ID, even among the news media and political enthusiasts who post to X and the like. His company acquired Dominion Voting Systems, one of the biggest manufacturers of American-used voting machines, in October. This sort of transaction makes news in the trade press, sure, but not in The Washington Post. Except it did, as well as in Axios, CNN, NPR, Slate, WIRED, and so on; and among social media accounts that command audiences just as large. The reasons why are twofold. One, Dominion was the target of fantastical allegations about the neutrality of its equipment in the 2020 elections, and has been awarded at least $850 million in settlement money from multiple defamation lawsuits ($787.5m from Fox News, $67m from Newsmax, undisclosed amounts from others). Reason number two is ironic given all that: Leiendecker’s background and the rebranding of his new company made the wrong first impression to a group for which suspicions passed as proof.
He was a Republican election official in St. Louis; that’s the first thumbtack on the cork board. The next one is that he worked underneath Ed Martin, who was chairman of the St. Louis elections board many years prior to receiving a congressional subpoena for his role in “Stop the Steal” and being appointed as U.S. pardon attorney during the second Trump administration. The yarn wraps around to Dominion’s new name, “Liberty Vote,” and its logo, which calls to mind an alternate universe in which the Philadelphia Eagles relocate to Texas. Then comes the final knot, a press release from Liberty Vote announcing that “[Leiendecker’s] mission is clear: to restore public confidence in the electoral process through transparent, secure, and trustworthy voting systems, including the use of hand-marked paper ballots.” Hand-marked paper ballots are a demand of activists who are skeptical of what was previously known as Dominion Voting.
With this particular combination of evidence, the Post ran a story headlined, “Dominion Voting, Trump and Fox’s target after 2020, gets a MAGA makeover.” WIRED ran theirs with, “One Republican Now Controls a Huge Chunk of US Election Infrastructure.” Slate alleged that the company now “would be in the hands of a self-declared partisan.” Robert Reich, former President Clinton’s labor secretary, who has 1.4 million followers on X, was the tersest of all: “Be warned.”
The gist of the response from those who have worked with Leiendecker and spoke with Declare has been a different two-word phrase: Be serious. “It’s kind of ridiculous,” said Matthew Potter, Leiendecker’s Democratic counterpart in the St. Louis elections office.
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It’s unusual for a journalist to share the following, but it contextualizes this story: Nobody pitched me to write this. I hadn’t heard of Leiendecker before October, and he didn’t respond to interview requests sent through Liberty Votes’ contact form and directly to his email address several days before this piece was published. My motivations are different and direct, and they reflect those of this news platform.
To start, there is evidence that party affiliation has influenced trust in the legitimacy of election outcomes for at least this entire century. In 2004, 72 percent of voters who cast a ballot for President Bush told the Pew Research Center they were “very confident” that votes across the country were counted accurately. Just 18 percent of Sen. John Kerry’s voters said the same. Those numbers flipped in 2008, and the margin held steady in 2012 — when Barack Obama was elected president twice and Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney lost. It wasn’t until 2020, “the COVID year,” an unprecedented year for election preparedness, that the losing party turned this ebbing and flowing of election mistrust into a sustained national issue. There have been severe consequences for how Americans view the most basic parts of their political process. “That to secure these rights,” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, goes the Declaration of Independence, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” (emphasis mine). Immigration, health care, foreign policy: these are all the various pitches and hits of the ballgame. Elections and governing institutions are the ballgame itself. If they fail, we all lose.
Appropriate, then, is to take seriously the spreading of claims from reputable or popular sources that major physical infrastructure of the U.S. election system has been compromised by partisans. In a post-2020 world, attentive citizens know where this can lead. “We do know that one of [President Trump’s] friends has purchased Dominion,” said Texas representative Jasmine Crockett last week on Marc Elias’s “Defending Democracy” podcast. “So it’s going to be really important for us to educate all [the] states that we can, to make sure that their secretary of states are like, ‘Mm-mm, we don’t want the Dominion machines,’ because I personally believe that that ally purchased Dominion so that he could potentially play with the machines.” (Elias didn’t address the comments; the podcast episode’s title labels Crockett “Congress’s Top Fighter.”)
No public information substantiates Crockett’s belief. The commentary and news analysis on which it almost surely rests barely qualify as conjecture. Here, by comparison, is what is known from Leiendecker’s limited public profile, local news accounts from more than a decade ago, and conversations with several former coworkers and fellow election professionals — most of them Democrats, because he served a large-majority Democratic jurisdiction, and many of them on the record.
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At the time Leiendecker began his career in election administration, sometime around the turn of 2005-06, St. Louis had struggled to shake recent memories of election controversy from the city’s reputation. On Election Day in 2000, St. Louis election sites encountered significant record-keeping problems and resulting long lines, which prompted a state judge to order a three-hour extension of voting. The election board had “failed to live up to its duty to the voters of this city,” Judge Evelyn Baker stated. The Justice Department later investigated and reached an agreement in 2002 that required the board to satisfy a number of specific conditions. The board, then, needed leaders with technical smarts and a knack for organizational management: qualities that Paul DeGregorio, a former St. Louis election official and chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, associated with a young Leiendecker.
DeGregoio is a fixture of the U.S. election community. He worked for Missouri attorney general John Ashcroft and the Small Business Administration during Ronald Reagan’s presidency before making a permanent, 40-year career change in 1985. He had known Leiendecker for half a decade, when he was a twenty-something campaign staffer in Missouri Republican politics, DeGregorio told me. But he believed that Leiendecker should follow a different professional track: his own.
“He was looking at a guy across the table who had taken that path into election administration. He had seen what this did for my career,” DeGregorio said. “I just saw in him the qualities for this. He was just passionate about politics and voting and civics. He grew up in the city, his heart was in the city, and this was for the city of St. Louis. I knew that he had the capacity and the integrity and the ethics. That’s what you want in an election official.”
Leiendecker was hired to be the Republican elections director for the city, working underneath a bipartisan, four-person board of commissioners, all chosen by the governor. From that board, the governor also designates the chairperson. At the time of Leiendecker’s hiring, that was Ed Martin — but not for long. Governor Matt Blunt tapped Martin to be his chief of staff in August 2006, while Leiendecker continued in his role through 2011. For about five years, he worked with the aforementioned Matthew Potter, who was the Democratic-appointed and de facto “deputy” elections director for the commission, being from the opposite party as that of the chairman. The working relationship with Leiendecker that he described was productive and focused on a comprehensive professionalization of their office: systems, procedures, HR, PR, “just the nuts and bolts of an organization that a lot of people don’t really want to do,” he said.
Given the context of this story, what stands out more, from Potter’s and others’ descriptions, is the credibility that Leiendecker built with his stakeholders, Democrats included. Most notable was St. Louis’s long-tenured mayor, Francis Slay, who was mayor during the entirety of Leiendecker’s six-year job with the board. In 2010, a nonprofit that provides technical assistance and research to fledgling democracies, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, selected Leiendecker to advise the administration of Kosovo’s first parliamentary elections after it declared its independence from Serbia. “St. Louis has benefited from Scott Leiendecker’s service and leadership and we are proud that one of our own has answered the call to serve in this important election,” Slay said, according to the St. Louis Beacon. Other contemporary media accounts mentioned the high regard that Slay’s office had for Leiendecker and Potter’s work.
Jeff Rainford, a St. Louis political consultant who was Slay’s chief of staff for more than 14 years, elaborated in an interview. He called the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle “really the first crisis in our new administration” — Slay’s term began in 2001, amid the DOJ’s probe — and credited Leiendecker in a right-man-for-the-job kind of way. (A difficult job.) “He added the technical expertise to run clean elections, and he had the temperament and the philosophical approach that everyone should be allowed to vote regardless of how they were going to vote,” Rainford said.
“There are just these people who, regardless of party, they view it as a higher calling.”
By the accounts given to Declare, Leiendecker is one such person. On the question that has prompted alarm, in mainstream headlines and the characterizations from the likes of Reich and Crocker — Is Scott Leiendecker a partisan or partisan-motivated? — his colleagues and peers are uniform.
“If you talk to election officials, they’d probably have no clue of Scott’s past politics. Probably had no past clue,” said DeGregorio. “But the fact of the matter is, for most election officials, they have some political background. They all do. They didn’t get their jobs unless they had a political background.”
Said Potter: “I think, what I know about him professionally and personally, is he’s going to put fair and honest elections above anything else. I just don’t think he’s this bogeyman that people think.”
And Rainford: “That we are Democrats did not matter to him. Well, it mattered to other people. But not to Scott.”
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Leiendecker left the St. Louis elections board in 2012 — the last time he worked a job in government or politics, in which his party was technically affixed to his name — to start an electronic poll book company called KNOWiNK. “When asked to take over as St. Louis City Elections Director, I joined an office facing significant turmoil. The position came with tremendous responsibility — ensuring every eligible voter could cast their ballot efficiently while maintaining absolute integrity in the process,” he says in a description on a company website. “Those years in the trenches taught me that the biggest pain point wasn’t just administrative — it was the voter experience. I wanted to solve this problem from the inside out to find a way to verify voters quickly while maintaining security.”
Thirteen years later, election officials whose jurisdictions contracted with Dominion and have heard from Leiendecker in his new capacity with Liberty Vote give the impression of someone who maintains a similar technical orientation toward his work. Colorado Public Radio spoke with multiple of them, who relayed details of their own conversations with Leiendecker; Colorado had been the U.S. headquarters of Dominion.
“From a security and technical perspective, everything still stands,” said Democratic Boulder County Clerk Molly Fitzpatrick, who talked with Leiendecker shortly after the sale and helped facilitate another call with every clerk in the state. “We still have multiple layers of security. We still have multiple checks and balances to demonstrate and verify integrity of the system. Everything that we have been saying for years is still the same.”
“He reiterated that he is an elections person and he has a long track record of being involved in elections,” said Fitzpatrick.
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“All of the mis- and disinformation certainly raises anxiety around this. And then when you see media reports that the new ownership is MAGA, so on and so forth, what does that mean?” said Matt Crane, the Executive Director of the Colorado County Clerks Association and a former Republican Arapahoe County clerk. He said concerns about the vision of the new ownership aren’t surprising, expected given the pressure election officials have been under since the 2020 presidential election.
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Crane has talked to Leiendecker in recent days and said he’s been transparent and allayed many of the clerks’ concerns.
None of the above addresses the particular wording of Liberty Vote’s initial press release, which mentions the company’s commitment to hand-marked paper ballots — not that there’s much to it. Leiendecker’s own words, on the homepage of Liberty Vote, are more general on the subject: “We are turning the page and beginning the vital work of restoring faith in American elections. While these changes will not happen overnight, Liberty Vote’s mission is rooted in American values and committed to transparency, independent audits, and verifiable paper records.” Shortly after this story was submitted for publishing, CNN reported that Liberty Vote worked with an “America First”-themed PR agency on a tight deadline for the rollout, the combination of which plausibly explains the tone of the original language. (“[W]hen CNN asked Leiendecker whether his acquisition of Dominion was a MAGA takeover, he replied, ‘it’s not,’ CNN’s article, which includes comment from Leiendecker, also states.)
Dominion made ballot marking devices, a technology in use for about a quarter of registered voters nationwide, which provide an electronic display for making choices and then print completed ballots for manual submission. (Think of filling out a PDF on a computer and then printing the completed document, only there’s no hard drive on the computer.) Most voters, by contrast, about 7 in 10, live in jurisdictions that use hand-marked paper ballots. In either kind of jurisdiction, ballots are typically counted with optical scanners, of which Dominion was also a major manufacturer. The hand-counting of ballots, an impossibly burdensome demand of election administrators for elections with 150,000,000 cast ballots, like in 2024, is a separate issue.
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Perhaps these are too many details. It’s a fair criticism. My defense would begin with this: “This” is our world. It’s our world in the sense that elections are decentralized and incorporate various procedures and equipment vendors. It’s our world in the sense that the era of digital media, and especially social media, provide limitless forums to question all this complexity, the various individuals and companies, all the voting rules and methods; and sometimes this can be good in the name of Accountability, and sometimes bad in the name of Partisanship. Finally, it’s our world in the sense that Declare exists to provide factual and thorough information about parts of this complex topic, foundational to America’s history, nonnegotiable for our future, relevant to every person who is or someday will be a voter. This includes a profile of the founder and chairman of an election equipment manufacturer, an unusual subject, but a fitting one for an unusual time.
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the Missouri governor who appointed Ed Martin to be his chief of staff. It has been updated.