Sequoia Voting Machines - Anyone know anything about?

[RamboLiberal]

Just curious cause it looks like my local county - Allegheny County(Pittsburgh area) PA - have dumped the idea of buying Diebold and are going to go with Sequoia.

Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato today said he will recommend that the county buy 2,800 electronic voting machines from Sequoia Voting Systems to comply with a federal law.

Under the law, the Help America Vote Act, local governments across the country are required to update their voting equipment or risk losing substantial amounts of federal aid.

Allegheny County's share of the aid, $12 million, will cover Sequoia's asking price of $11.8 million.

The machine, the AVC Advantage, is a "full-face" model, meaning a voter can see the entire ballot at one time, similar to the lever machines that have been in use here since the 1960s. But the Sequoia machine also meets HAVA's requirements for handicapped accessibility.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06052/658795.stm

[T Wolf]

1. Here in Montgomery County (outside Philly) we have been "blessed"

with Sequoia machines for a couple of years.

I remember initially investigating them (who owns the company, etc.) when they first showed up and found that, though there is not the infamy associated with Diebold, the company is as solidly repuke as Diebold.

And there is no paper trail.

Vote absentee.

[petgoat]

5. Vote absentee.

My cousin in California saw the opscan absentee ballots counted in a Sequoia installation.
The op-scan machines are about the size of giant copy machines, and each one has a monitor
and a keyboard, and they're all networked together into a hub computer, and the results are
then transmitted to the same tabulating computer that counts all the electronic voting terminal
votes.

So the opscan votes are just as hackable as the others.

[shance]

6. Sequoia is part of the big corrupt three: Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia

A Venezuelan company recently purchased the COmpany, which considering who owns Diebold and ES&S, thats progress :)

We need citizen run elections and public tabulations of the votes at civic centers nationwide.

Its not as much who casts the vote who decides the election, its who COUNTS the votes. Thats what we really need to be focusing on right now.

[Twist_U_Up]

2. Here

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=919&Itemid=51

[Angry Girl]

3. Google sequoia voting scandal and weep....

http://www.google.com/search?q=sequoia+voting+scandal&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

[petgoat]

4. Look up Jerry Fowler, a LA election official who was jailed after

receiving $10 million in bribes from Sequoia systems, which somehow kept their
name out of the papers.

The founder of Sequoia's predecessor company, Lloyd A. Dixon Jr., wound up in prison after bribing Buffalo election officials.

http://www.madcowprod.com/11242004.html

Sequoia appears to have had some connections to the Gambino crime family, and its sometime CFO Louis Wolfson is the only person ever convicted of bribing a US Supreme Court Justice (Abe Fortas).

http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=5103

I'm told that Silicon Valley's Santa Clara County uses Sequoia systems, and that in a place awash with
unemployed computer talent it was necessary to employ three Sequoia technicians to run the vote counts
in the November 2005 elections. So it appears they are not real user-friendly.

Sequoia Systems was recently purchased for $16 million. Such a piddly-ass valuation (remember the $10 million in bribes to Jerry Fowler?) suggests that the legitimate money in election machines is not the real money in election machines.

http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=4975