CA: Sequoia Quietly Leading State e-voting

File Under: While You Were Repeating Diebold Like a Mantra

Sequoia Quietly Leading State e-voting

Foreign ownership an issue for rising Oakland company

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

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.

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Critics of electronic voting say Sequoia's Venezuelan ownership isn't as much an issue as the industry's penchant for secrecy.

Doug Jones, a computer science professor and voting systems examiner in Iowa, said the company matters less if the voting machinery is open to public scrutiny.

"You care less about them if the system is patently transparent and you can tell whether it's honest," Jones said. "If we had sufficient transparency in our elections systems, the devil himself could build our voting systems and we could still hold honest elections."

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http://insidebayarea.com/argus/localnews/ci_3954496

goodbye and go back to sleep.