-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 19, 2007 7:56:54 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Sequoia Voting Systems Responsible for 2000 Presidential
Debacle
Sequoia Voting Systems Responsible for 2000 Presidential Debacle
By Kim Zetter
August 15, 2007 | 3:08:48 PM
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/sequoia-voting-.html
It's been seven years since pregnant and dangling chads in Florida
caused one of the biggest political rifts in U.S. history. Those
faulty Florida ballots also directly led to the passage of federal
legislation in 2002 that outlawed punch-card voting machines and
allocated billions of dollars in federal funds for states to
purchase expensive new electronic voting machines.
Now new questions are being raised about who was responsible for
the faulty punch cards in that election. And according to last
night's Dan Rather Reports episode, the fingers point to Sequoia
Voting Systems, which not only makes e-voting machines that
replaced punch cards but also created the punch cards that failed
in Florida.
Rather and his producers spoke with several former workers of
Sequoia who revealed that in 2000 the company changed the paper
stock it used for punch cards to paper made by Boise Cascade and
that they knew before the election that the punch cards that
Sequoia was producing would cause problems. In fact, pre-election
testing by Sequoia showed that the cards were not punching cleanly
and that dangling chads were going to be a likely problem in the
election.
The original transcript from the Rather program is difficult to
read because it lacks punctuation and paragraph breaks, but I've
added paragraph breaks here so you can understand more clearly what
the workers told Rather. You can also watch the entire Dan Rather
report, The Trouble with Touch Screens, here. Per the transcript:
Linda Evans recalls the chad testing of ballots manufactured for
the 2000 election.
Chads were falling out. Chads were hanging up. We've got a machine
that it we call a gang punch, which in a sense punches out all the
holes at the same time. You slide the card in there and you pull
down the handle and it punches out all the holes. They weren't
punching out. They were hanging up all over the places.
They were aware of that.
Oh, management was aware of it. We told 'em.
Ms. Evans says that management had a simple response to her warnings:
It'll be okay.
But it wasn't okay, according to Evans and her co-workers. They
believe that the chad problems at the factory became chad problems
in Florida- causing at the very least thousands of undervotes, due
to hanging or stuck chads. There were over 10,000 undervotes in
Palm Beach County.
According to Rather, more than 50,000 Sequoia punch cards were
discarded as invalid because voters appeared to have overvoted, and
on 17,000 of the Sequoia cards, voters seemed to have voted for
three or more presidential candidates.
As soon as news about the problematic Florida ballots hit the
airwaves, Sequoia's workers told Rather they immediately knew where
the blame lay, though they never told reporters.
It's the morning after the election in 2000. You turned on the
television, you turned on the radio and you saw and heard about the
mess in Florida. Tell me what you thought. Let's start over with
you. What'd you think?
Oh, man. Somebody blew it bad and I bet it was us. Well, I-- I knew
it was us and-- I didn't expect anything less than fiascos. Because
you knew you were dealing with bad paper. Because we were dealing
with bad paper and old tooling. I get a phone call. And it's-- the
first one was from my wife. She goes, "What you guys do?" I go,
"What happened?" She goes, "The ballots are bad in Florida. Palm
Beach."
So, then, I hang up and then the next person calls me is my boss
Jim Johnson and he tells me, "We blew it. The ballots are bad in
Florida."
It's all over the news and when you got to the plant in the days
after the election, what was the scene there?
It was chaotic. They were moving stuff, hiding stuff, get rid of this.
Hiding stuff?
Yeah, because the news people wanted to come in and talk to people
and they wanted to tour the plant. We were told to get rid of
everything, anything that had Florida on it had to disappear
And did it disappear?
Yes. Nothing with any kind of Boise Cascade labels was supposed to
be left around.
And that word came from whom?
Brian Lehrman.
Who was?
The plant manager.
We repeatedly invited Sequoia to have Brian Lehrman on camera to
answer some of the workers allegations Sequoia declined.
The worker goes on to make an unsubstantiated claim about what he
thinks happened in the 2000 election.
My own personal opinion was the touch screen voting system wasn't
getting off the ground like they would hope. They weren't having
any problems with paper ballots. So, I feel like they deliberately
did all this to have problems with the paper ballots so that their
electronic voting system could get off the ground -- and it did, in
a big way ....
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