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Even this minimal amount of transparency had to be extracted at Board-point.

While it's true private companies such as these are under no obligation to inform the public about the details of their ownership, they're all involved with providing goods and services to government agencies. Government agencies hooking up with private companies that treat ownership details as trade secrets isn't a good idea -- not when the government has certain transparency obligations.

Even with the release of these details, there's still plenty of secrecy to go around. Election security advocate Lynn Berstein says the ownership of voting machine companies is a deliberate, multi-layered mess designed to obscure who's running these shops -- and to possibly hide a bunch of stuff that looks like corruption, fraud, or general financial malfeasance.

One of ES&S's subsidiaries (and there are at least 39 of those) -- Meritage Homes Corp. -- shuffled some securities ownership the same day the North Carolina election board asked it to provide information about the company's ownership. Maybe it's a coincidence. Or maybe ES&S was offloading a politically-inconvenient owner. Whatever the case is, it certainly doesn't look good.

The government can't do everything itself. It will need vendors to supply goods and services. But these vendors need to operate under the same transparency the government is forced to, if they want to secure these lucrative contracts. Voters aren't given a choice in voting machine providers. They're stuck with whatever their government gives them. But when the government actually decides to perform a little vetting, the makes of the machines trusted to deliver accurate vote counts want to hide behind trade secret exceptions to prevent the public -- and their elected officials -- from knowing exactly who they're dealing with when they head into the voting booth.

Given the abhorrent track record of so many voting machine companies, it's no surprise they're extremely reluctant to share any details with the voting public. But that doesn't make them right. It just makes them a little bit more evil.

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