Scott Leiendecker is a former Republican elections director from St. Louis who served under Ed Martin, then chair of the St. Louis election board and now Trump’s DOJ Pardon Attorney and Director of the Weaponization Working Group.³⁹ ⁴⁰ In 2011, Leiendecker founded KNOWiNK, a company that manufactures electronic poll books used to check in voters at polling locations. KNOWiNK’s Poll Pad devices are internet-connected and can sync in real time through a monitoring platform called ePulse. In the 2024 election, 36 million voters in 29 states were checked in using KNOWiNK devices. This represented approximately one in four voters nationally.⁴¹ Security researchers at Project Minnesota identified “precision cheating” vulnerabilities in the system, noting that internet-connected poll books could potentially be used to target specific precincts or voters.⁴²

In October 2025, Leiendecker acquired Dominion Voting Systems and rebranded it as Liberty Vote.⁴³ Dominion equipment was used in 27 states in the 2024 election. The acquisition price was not disclosed. Leiendecker claimed to have personally financed the purchase. As a condition of the sale, Leiendecker required Dominion to settle its defamation lawsuits against Trump allies who had falsely accused the company of rigging the 2020 election. In the weeks before the acquisition closed, Dominion reached undisclosed settlements with Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and One America News Network.⁴⁴

Liberty Vote’s acquisition announcement explicitly pledged compliance with President Trump’s executive order on voting procedures. That executive order has been blocked by federal judges as unconstitutional. The announcement used language echoing election denial talking points: “restore public confidence in the electoral process,” “paper-based transparency,” and “100% American-owned.” Three companies control 92 percent of the voting machine market. The combined KNOWiNK and Liberty Vote operation will function in more than 40 states. One individual now controls both the poll book systems used to check in voters and the voting machines used to count their ballots across a significant portion of the American electorate.

Post-election audits in 2024 followed the same pattern as previous elections. They verified that machines counted ballots as programmed. They did not examine whether QR codes matched human-readable ballot text. They did not examine whether software had been modified. They did not examine whether voter roll purges had removed eligible voters. The audits checked whether the machines did what they were told to do. They did not check whether what they were told to do was legitimate.