By Adam Andrzejewski

Key points:

• Dominion Voting Systems is the second largest vendor in the non-transparent and entrenched election system industry where three vendors control 88-percent of the market.
• Recent Dominion contracts with major counties and cities across America set service agreements for years or even decades—helping lock-in the company’s dominant market position and prevent competition. 

Dominion Voting Systems was paid $118.3 million to provide election services during the past three years, according to public records. Their revenues came from 19 states and 133 local governments including counties, cities, and even a couple of school districts.

Since presidential election of 2020, Dominion has come under wide public scrutiny, particularly in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—critical toss-up states with close winning margins.

In their Dunn & Bradstreet filings, Dominion claimed annual sales of $36.5 million with contracts in 22 states and 600 local jurisdictions. However, the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative estimated that Dominion was in 1,645 jurisdictions with $100 million in annual revenues (2018).

So, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com tracked Dominion’s revenues using state and local government spending disclosures, i.e. their checkbooks. (Dominion is a private company and, therefore, is not required to disclose financials. However, public bodies must be transparent, because they spend taxpayer money.)

Compiling the records required open record requests in 49 of the 50 states and in 11,400 local governments. Only California, which we are suing, rejected our sunshine request. 

Here is a state-by-state description of our findings. (Download our raw payment data spanning 2017 through 2019.)

Georgia: In 2019, a $107 million ten-year contract with Dominion procured by the Secretary of State covers 30,000 touch screen voting machines and the installation of a “verified paper ballot” voting system. $89 million in payments were front-loaded into the first two-years of the contract.

New Mexico: Dominion received $52 million from the state government. Services included the full suite of hardware and software information-technology agreements. 

Michigan: $31.5 million flowed from the state government ($30.8 million) and 22 localities over the last three years. Top spending local governments included Detroit ($457,880); Livonia ($65,310); Saginaw ($53,314); Dearborn ($22,975) and Antrim County($20,056). 

Services included machines, equipment repair, election services, ballot marking printers, vote tabulators and ballot boxes, modem cell services contracts, election coding, and voting machine coding. 

Nevada: Clark County, the largest in Nevada, contracted for $28.7 million to have the company run its elections through 2032. The Secretary of State’s Office paid Dominion for $510,130.

California:  In 2019, the County of Santa Clara contracted with Dominion for up to $16.2 million to run their election services for the next eight-years. San Francisco’s 2019 contract covers five-years for an amount not to exceed $12.7 million.

$11.1 million in payments to Dominion came from just 15 counties and cities. The largest payer was Alameda ($5.2 million). Other counties included San Francisco ($4.2 million, Butte ($376), Glenn ($42,350), Monterey ($233,291), San Benito ($173,049), Santa Cruz ($583), Shasta ($3,975), Sierra ($9,571), Siskiyou ($127,314), Kern ($127,267), San Luis Obispo ($500,536), and San Mateo ($457,703). 

Illinois: Cook County, the second most populous county in the country, signed a $31 million ten-year contract with Dominion in 2018. Competitor Election Systems & Software (ES&S) sued alleging equipment scanning problems and lack of state certification; later, ES&S dropped the case. Chicago has a ten-year $22 million deal. 

From 2017-2019, payments of $6.2 million from six counties and cities flowed to Dominion. Cook County ($5.5 million) and the City of Chicago ($533,018) were the largest payers. Other counties included DuPage ($70,520), Kankakee ($9,900), Macoupin County ($15,153), and Winnebago ($18,900). 

Arizona: We found the 2019-2022 contract in Maricopa County at total taxpayer cost of $6.1 million over three-years. The City of Phoenix also paid Dominion $48,300.

New York: The state spent $95.8 million with Dominion from 2008 through 2014 then renewed the contract through 2021.

From 2017-2019, $4.4 million from 44 government entities paid Dominion. Here are the top five counties: Suffolk ($1.1 million), Niagara ($539,334), Orange ($336,480), Monroe ($301,435), and Madison ($300,884). Interestingly, there were six school districts paying Dominion for election services. 

Purchase descriptions ranged from batteries, compact flash memory cards, receipt paper for voting machines, warranty and support for “imagecast voting,” EMS 3-day training, absentee central count ballots and election day ballots, “pre marked test ballots,” firmware and hardware warranty, voting systems, and much more. 

Pennsylvania: $1.1 million from five counties contracted with Dominion: Armstrong ($701,560), Crawford ($201,880), Washington ($121,880), Somerset County ($39,286), and Warren ($10,532). The disclosures did not list the services purchased.

Wisconsin: Dominion voting machines are used in the counties of Racine, Washington, and Ozaukee. In the large counties of Dane and Milwaukee, ES&S machines are used. 

We were not able to capture government checkbook data on Dominion expenditures in Wisconsin.