The Dominion Incompetence

One thing i'm doing to work my way though the current uncharted territory is to rely on my own life experience. I've never been in politics, and I've never canvassed an election. I spent most of my career in the corporate world, and due to the unstable tech environment of the 1980s and 90s, I worked for several companies that went belly-up. Corporate sinking ships are something I'm familiar with. So what can I apply to situations like Fox News, Dominion Voting, or Smartmatic that can give me clues to what's going on, irrespective of the election?

One thing I learned in that corporate environment was the need to maintain situational awareness and, as contingency planners might put it, always have an updated backup copy of your resume offsite. Inevitably I began to learn the signs that my employer was going south, just to know it was time to polish the resume again. A big sign was corporate whistling-past-the-graveyard in PR statements, or in worst cases, outright lies.

So let's look at Dominion Voting in the past several days. They haven't changed the angry all-caps assertions on their home page that I noted on Thursday, including 1) VOTE DELETION/SWITCHING ASSERTIONS ARE COMPLETELY FALSE. But this story reports,

Santa Clara County, California, as part of its agreement with Dominion Voting Systems, stipulates that the company's software must allow county staff "to adjust tally based on review of scanned ballot images."

. . . "This is normal," [the county spokeswoman] said. "Anybody who has Dominion has this. We’re not the only county that has to adjudicate ballots."

Sidney Powell, in her numerous recent interviews, has begun to point to training materials from Dominion that document such capabilities, something I predicted last week.

Smartmatic has a similar problem. I've already cited its statement, still on its site, that "Smartmatic has never provided Dominion Voting Systems with any software, hardware or other technology." But this story reports that in 2007, Smartmatic sold its subsidiary Sequoia Voting Systems to Dominion. Web references to the announcements of this transaction have been scrubbed, but as usual, nothing really disappears from the web.

Leaving the election completely aside, if I were working for either Dominion or Smartmatic, this would be a sign for me to update that offsite contingency resume and start checking the job sites. Election schmelection, this is a sign of either gross incompetence or deliberate coverup, and the company will be heading south sooner than anyone expects.

The angry public statements from both companies are an indication they're in what they may fantasize as "crisis management" mode, but the only way you succeed with crisis management is to be completely transparent. Clearly neither is doing this.

In fact, I would say this provides insight into why Dominion withdrew from testifying in a Pennsylvania House committee hearing yesterday, at a time when, from a crisis management standpoint, the company should be wanting to get its side of the story out.

It's hard not to conclude that Dominion's lawyers told its executives not to make public statements. But why lawyer up? I think the problem their lawyers see is that their involvement in the election could become a criminal matter. That's fine, but what's happened clearly is that the company's executives have dropped the shareholders' interest -- being transparent to allow the enterprise to continue -- in favor of their own -- saying nothing for the public record to reduce exposure to criminal prosecution.

The Dominion board should terminate everyone involved in that decision for conflict of interest, but that's not going to happen. They're incompetent as well.

One way this relates to the election is that neither Smartmatic nor Dominion is a reliable partner for the Democrats. Beyond what they've said on their websites, which is proving untrue, the companies won't be able to provide public support to the position that the election was fair.