Sequoia Voting Systems was a California-based company that was one of the largest providers of electronic voting systems in the U.S., having offices in Oakland, Denver and New York City. Some of its major competitors were Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) and Election Systems & Software.
On 8 March 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, founded by three Venezuelan software engineers. In November 2007, following a verdict by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Smartmatic was ordered to sell Sequoia, which it did to its Sequoia managers having U.S. citizenship.
On 4 June 2010, certain assets were acquired by the Canadian company Dominion Voting Systems. At the time it had contracts for 300 jurisdictions in 16 states through its BPS, WinEDS, Edge, Edge2, Advantage, Insight, InsightPlus and 400C systems.[1]
In February 2014, Sequoia filed a bankruptcy petition under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code.[2]
History
Sequoia Voting Systems began as Mathematical Systems Corporation of Anaheim, California, the developers of a punched-card voting system that served as an alternative to the Votomatic.[3][4] Some time around 1970, Diamond National Corporation (the holding company that grew from the Diamond Match Company) acquired the company. In the 1970s, Diamond National became Diamond International, which was acquired and reorganized by Jefferson Smurfit, an Irish printing conglomerate, producing Smurfit Diamond Packaging Corporation. Diamond spun off its punched-card voting business in 1983 as Sequoia Pacific Systems Corporation.[5]
In 1984, Sequoia purchased the voting machine business of AVM Corporation (the former Automatic Voting Machine Corporation) and was reorganized as Sequoia Voting Systems. AVM had its roots in a number of voting machine companies founded in the 1890s, but by the 1980s, most of its business was in other fields. Nonetheless, in the late 1950s, AVM had begun investing in the development of electronic voting machines.[6] By the time Sequoia bought the AVM voting business, the AVM Automatic Voting Computer (AVC) was ready for market.
Controversies
California decertification/recertification
On August 3, 2007, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen withdrew approval and granted conditional reapproval[14] to Sequoia Voting Systems optical scan and DRE voting machines after a "review of the voting machines certified for use in California in March 2007"[14] found "significant security weaknesses throughout the Sequoia system"[15] and "pervasive structural weaknesses"[15] which raise "serious questions as to whether the Sequoia software can be relied upon to protect the integrity of elections."[15]
"Hanging chads" controversy
See also
- 2004 United States election voting controversies
- Venezuelan recall referendum of 2004
External links
References
- Archived copy retrieved 2010-11-21^
- Colorado Bankruptcy Court - Case number 1:14-bk-11360 | Business-Bankruptcies.com^
- Votamatic Verified Voting Foundation, retrieved 30 May 2015^