It is not so much who owns them, it is who owns the software installed. No one is allowed to view the source code that tells the machines how to record and count the votes! By US law it is 'vendor proprietary information'. When the machines go haywire and you see the wrong candidate recorded, or the numbers seem strange and or the vote is close, you then see ballots destroyed before recounts. All with zero accountability. A group I work with tried in 2006 to have a federal uniform law for all states using electronics for voting. The law was to count enough paper ballots against the certified electronic totals to make sure the race wasn't hacked. A 3% audit of randomly-chosen precincts. Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey sponsored our bill, New Jersey uses that model. New Hampshire does even better. But Texas New York Arizona Florida C  71d1  alifornia Nevada on and on, have no real verification of electronic certified totals. In Florida the optical scanned paper ballots are stowed away for recount purposes only. The audit is 1 to 2% of ballots checked against the electronic total. They are not even verifying 50% of the vote. Therefore they don't know if it's accurate and the procedure is just a dog and pony show. Can the President do an executive order on this?