June 19, 2006

"Sequoia quietly leading state e-voting"

"For three years, the nation's two largest suppliers of voting machinery have driven feverishly for sales and shown the symptoms of overextension — missed deliveries, faulty equipment and breach-of-contract lawsuits.

Until recently, the supplier running a close third kept a lower profile than competitors Diebold and Election Systems & Software, though quietly snapping up sales of voting systems on both coasts, all of Nevada and Louisiana, as well as Chicago and Cook County.

With a $13.3 million contract signed Friday by Alameda County, Sequoia Voting Systems arguably became the dominant voting-system maker in California, with more counties than any other.

Outside California, a controversy has sprung up over the foreign ownership of Oakland-based Sequoia.

Politicians in the Windy City and CNN journalist Lou Dobbs suggested recently that the federal government was derelict in not having investigated Sequoia and its acquisition last year by Smartmatic, a Boca Raton, Fla., firm largely owned by Venezuelan businessmen.

After Chicago and Cook County were plagued with delays this spring in tallying a primary, city alderman Edward Burke suggested Sequoia's voting machines were part of a conspiracy by Venezuela President Hugo Chavez to manipulate U.S. elections.

"We may have stumbled across what could be (an) international conspiracy to subvert the electoral process in the United States of America," Burke told reporters. "Tell me a single, solitary reason there is to trace ownership through three shell corporations to the Curacao Islands and its roots to Venezuela, where they have already been involved with the dictator of Venezuela, who Defense Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld says is an enemy of the United States."

Soon after, editorial writers at Investors Business Daily warned that "we might just get ambushed again if the Venezuelan government ends up controlling our elections."

In late May, the U.S. Treasury Department requested Sequoia and Smartmatic documents on the transaction, as a potential preliminary to review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., a process typically reserved for defense firms. A few days later, Dobbs opened fire on electronic voting and Sequoia in particular as "an outright threat to our democracy."

Next to a television logo reading "Democracy for Sale," Dobbs said, "we know what we're dealing with, and it is a dysfunctional government that is trying to render our elections precisely the same."

The indignation has taken Sequoia executives by surprise, partly because Sequoia has been foreign-owned for 24 years. The firm's roots go back to 1890."

You can read the article here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at June 19, 2006 08:57 AM