Susan Greenhalgh for Slate:

Earlier this month, news broke that Dominion Voting Systems had been sold to a former Republican election official.

The announcement that the second-largest U.S. voting system vendor would be in the hands of a self-declared partisan sparked concerns and speculation on blogs and social media. Should a former Republican official be charged with providing and programming the voting machines to count more than a quarter of all U.S. ballots?

As someone who has studied election systems and the election industry for 20 years, I’ve gotten questions from family and friends wanting to know if this is something to be worried about.

My response has been: Not particularly. But don’t misunderstand the nonchalance—it’s not because it’s not wildly inappropriate and troubling for a declared partisan to control voting equipment. It’s because the partisan ownership of an election supplier is merely one aspect of the badly broken, opaque, and corrupted election system industry that we’ve been subjected to for decades….