Three companies control 92% of U.S. voting equipment, and the federal certification bottleneck blocks new competitors from entering the market

ES&S, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic together provide voting equipment to roughly 92% of the U.S. voting population. ES&S alone controls about 50% of the market. This oligopoly formed after the Help America Vote Act of 2002 drove a wave of acquisitions—Dominion bought Sequoia Voting Systems and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold), while ES&S absorbed competitors until forced to divest on antitrust grounds. The reason this matters is not abstract market theory—it directly drives up costs and slows down innovation for the counties that actually buy the equipment. When only three vendors exist, a county negotiating a $2 million voting system replacement has almost no leverage. Vendors can charge premium prices for maintenance contracts, replacement parts, and software updates because the switching costs are enormous: a new system requires retraining every poll worker, redesigning every ballot template, and re-integrating with the county's election management software. Counties are effectively locked in for a decade or more once they choose a vendor. The structural reason this persists is the EAC's federal certification process. There are only two accredited testing laboratories (VSTLs) in the entire country, and each vendor can only have one system under federal certification at a time. Certification campaigns routinely take 12-18 months and cost millions of dollars. A startup building a better, more secure, or more accessible voting system faces years of testing and millions in costs before it can sell a single unit. This barrier to entry is why the market consolidated in the first place and why it stays consolidated—the certification regime that was designed to ensure security has the side effect of freezing out competition and locking counties into expensive, aging systems from a handful of incumbents.