The Election Assistance Commission has admonished the nation's largest manufacturer of voting equipment for making misleading claims in some of its marketing materials.
The federal agency's upbraiding of Election Systems & Software was prompted by a complaint from two good-government groups, Free Speech for People and the National Election Defense Coalition, which discovered that ES&S was claiming that one of its voting machines with a modem option was EAC certified.
The EAC action is significant because the agency has been criticized for not aggressively monitoring the voting machine industry, which is one of its principal assignments. The small but primary agency overseeing how states conduct voting has struggled through a leadership change, turnover and budget cutbacks in the runup to this November's election but has been starting to rebuild itself in recent months.
The agency sets voluntary standards for voting systems, and most states adopt by law or regulation some aspect of the federal testing and certification program.
Security is one of key elements of the standards, particularly in the wake of hacking attempts by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential election. Any part of a voting system that could connect to the internet is considered to create an opportunity for a virtual break-in.
In their complaint field in January, the advocacy groups pointed out that marketing materials sent out for the ES&S DS200 voting system suggested that a version that included a modem had been federally certified. Only the version without a modem is certified, because modems are seen as opening up equipment to easy interference.
The company told the government it never intended to imply the modem-version was certified, promising to remove all references to the optional use of modems from its marketing materials.
The EAC's head of voting machine certification, Jerome Lovato, nonetheless concluded that promoting the modem violated the agency's testing and certification rules. He gave the company 15 days to come up with a plan to remove the sales brochures from circulation and notify customers they were inaccurate.
And he said ES&S should take the same steps with materials that exaggerated in describing vote tabulation systems as being submitted to rigorous and extensive independent testing campaigns as part of the federal certification program.
The company rejected that finding and said it wouldn't take corrective action, asserting its tabulation systems have all been approved by the EAC, even those for use in states that don't use the federal standards.
Lovato told the company it could have seen its equipment decertified and its manufacturer registration suspended. Instead, the federal regulator concluded the letter this way: "You are a valued stakeholder and I appreciate your proactive and prompt response."
Officials at Free Speech for People said that ES&S has sold voting machines with wireless modems to states around the country — including the presidential battlegrounds of Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The company's website points out that using the modems to transmit unofficial results is legal in some states and that the company employs "numerous security safeguards to protect the transfer" of the information.
Susan Greenhalgh of Free Speech for People rejected the company's claim that it was not intending to be deceptive. "ES&S has a pattern of deception," she said. "We're very pleased the EAC took action to rebuke ES&S for its false claims, but this is just a part of a larger pattern of duplicity from the voting system vendors that operate with little to no oversight and without meaningful regulation."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.