If you used a mail-in ballot in Fulton County, Georgia this year, you may have noticed peculiar language at the top of the ballot: “Copyright © 2020 Dominion Voting Inc.” Dominion Voting is a private company that sells election technology. And this ballot design — which was created by Dominion and counted using the company’s proprietary equipment — is technically its intellectual property.Unusual as it may seem, this isn’t uncommon: Most voting technology used throughout the U.S. is covered by intellectual property law. That means the touch-screen you might have tapped on to vote could be patented. The software used to process your vote could be copyrighted. Before you even got to the voting booth, your ballot was likely designed on copyrighted software. And all of it could cause a nightmare after Nov. 3, according to election-security experts. “We’re going to wind up with a thousand court cases that cannot just be resolved by just going into the software and checking to see what happened, because it’s proprietary,” said Ben Ptashnik, the co-founder of the National Election Defense Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group that pushes Congress to reform election security.
Arizona: Pro-Trump protesters gather around Maricopa County counting center | Henry Austin, Gadi Schwartz, Kurt Chirbas and Colin Sheeley/NBC
A crowd of protesters, some of them armed, claimed the vote had been stolen from President Donald Trump as they gathered outside the counting center in Maricopa County, Phoenix, late Wednesday, ahead of the release of new results in the presidential and Senate races. It was one of several demonstrations across the country — some about the election, some about racial inequality. In New York, 50 people were arrested, officials told NBC New York. In Maricopa, some in the 300-strong crowd chanted “count the votes” and “Fox News sucks,” after the TV network called Arizona in Joe Biden’s favor. Arizona is too close to call, according to NBC News. Biden leads there with 50.5 percent to Trump’s 48.1 percent, with 86 percent of the expected vote in — a difference of just under 70,000 votes. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is the largest in the state and will prove crucial in the presidential race.
Full Article: Pro-Trump protesters gather around Maricopa County, Arizona, counting center