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Sequoia Voting Thwarts New Jersey Investigation
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-03-24
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Discrepancies in the vote recording by machines provided by Sequoia Voting Systems for the New Jersey primary spurred calls for an investigation, one that Sequoia fought off with legal threats.
Union County, New Jersey, voting showed some oddities on about 60 Sequoia machines. Yet the concerns of the county could not be addressed through an independent investigation.
Columnist Robert X. Cringely said on his blog a play for Union County to enlist the assistance of Princeton professor and electronic voting authority Ed Felten suffered legal interference for both Felten and the County. Once the threats arrived, the County dropped its plans to investigate:
Felten has a long history of finding flaws in voting machines; in past years he has demonstrated how easily a Diebold machine could be hacked and made to display inaccurate voting totals.
But Felten never got the chance to fiddle with the Sequoia machines, because the company sicced its attorneys on him and the county.
Sequoia says any independent investigation would violate its trade secrets.
Basic issues in the mathematical counts by Sequoia's machines merit deeper review. Without an independent look, the perception will persist that a company's interests matter more than the public interest in fairly counting votes in November for the next President.
What's even more surprising is the lack of a federal response on the issue. The problem sounds tailor-made for federal election overseers, except that their mandate covers financing issues for candidates.
Those candidates should be calling for an investigation. After all, it's their political futures balanced on machines that demonstrably provide different tallies for votes registered through them.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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