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Voting Machine Maker Threatens Legal Action Against Auditors

by Peter Mychalcewycz on March 21, 2008 at 10:49 AM

faulty voting machines

Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the largest producers of digital voting machines in the world, has sent a letter legally threatening Edward Felten, a well known Princeton Law Professor. The letter threatens legal action if Felten and his colleagues publish any security audit of the Sequoia voting systems. The possibility of litigation has forced Union County (New Jersey) to forgo any plans of a potential investigation into errors involving the machines that occurred during the state's Presidential Primary. Felten has led past security audits involving voting machines.

The specific interest in Sequoia Voting Systems is a result of no less than seven districts in New Jersey reporting problems with the machines during the most recent presidential primaries. These problems resulted in errors regarding the number of ballots cast and a delay in the final vote tally.

Sequoia Systems insists the problems were caused by human error, not faulty hardware.The two-page letter argues that the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.

Here is a small news flash for Sequoia Voting Systems. The American voting public does not care in the least why those ballots were tainted. The sanctity of the voting process is one of the few things left that reaffirms the belief that we may still have some influence on our collective future as a nation. Whether it is your complex machinery or a technically challenged poll worker that screws up the vote tally, the end result is precisely same: a tainted election. There is no doubt that Sequoia needs to take security measures to ensure its voting machines are not corrupted or rigged to produce unfair results. However, such measures cannot be used as a blanket defense for what could be construed as a simple fear of commercial failure.

The fate of our nation cannot be placed in the secretive arms of any corporation without complete, balanced oversight. Ever.


From NJ.com and Engadget


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Tags: election 2008, Election2008

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