Numlock Sunday: Jessica Huseman on voting machines

Oleksandr Vakulin/Scopio

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer, behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Jessica Huseman who wrote “The Market for Voting Machines Is Broken. This Company Has Thrived in It” for ProPublica. Here's what I wrote about it:

The market for voting technology — ballot boxes and the like — is only about $300 million in the U.S. and just a few firms have majority control of the business. Dominion has 30 percent of the market, Hart InterCivic has 15 percent, but the elephant in the room is ES&S, an Omaha company with 500 employees and 50 percent of the country’s election system market, with some 70 million Americans pulling the lever on an ES&S machine. After big firms like IBM got out of the game in the late ‘60s, this became a classic situation where entrenched market participants have inflated sway in th…