Dominion, the voting tech company at the center of false 2020 claims, is sold

Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of false fraud claims about the 2020 election, has been acquired by an entity called Liberty Vote.

“As of today, Dominion is gone,” the company said in a press release Thursday. “Liberty Vote assumes full ownership and operational control.” Dominion’s website now redirects to libertyvote.com.

President Trump and his allies, including Rudy Giuliani, have falsely blamed Dominion and its machines for rigging the 2020 election, taking votes from Trump. The baseless claims against Dominion caused one of its executives to go into hiding in 2020, and led to numerous defamation lawsuits.

Giuliani recently reached a confidential settlement with Dominion. Most notably, Dominion won a nearly $800 million defamation case against Fox News.

Earlier this year, an official with Trump’s Justice Department reached out to county clerks in Missouri and asked to inspect Dominion voting equipment they used in 2020.

The Liberty Vote release makes a couple of nods to conservative election priorities, including calling the acquisition “a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America.” Conservatives in recent years have used the phrase “election integrity” and talked about increasing faith in the nation’s voting systems.

The release also notes that one of Liberty Vote’s priorities is “[l]everaging hand-marked paper ballots enabling compliance with President Trump’s executive order, and ensuring election security and compliance with federal standards.”

Most U.S. voters already vote using hand-marked paper ballots. Much of Trump’s March executive order on voting has been halted by federal judges.

The new company is founded by Scott Leiendecker, a onetime St. Louis Republican election director who founded an election technology company that’s broadly used by election officials.