Sequoia Voting Systems was a

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

-based company that is one of the largest providers of

electronic voting Electronic voting (also known as e-voting) is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots. Depending on the particular implementation, e-voting may use standalone ''electronic voting machines'' ( ...

systems in the

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

, having offices in

Oakland Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...

Denver Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...

and

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. Some of its major competitors were

Premier Election Solutions Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI), was a subsidiary of Diebold that made and sold voting machines. In 2009, it was sold to competitor ES&S. In 2010, Dominion Voting Systems purchased the primary asset ...

(formerly Diebold Election Systems) and Election Systems & Software. Certain assets were acquired by the Canadian company

Dominion Voting Systems Dominion Voting Systems Corporation is a company that sells electronic voting hardware and software, including voting machines and tabulators, in the United States and Canada. The company's headquarters are in Toronto, Ontario, and Denver, Colo ...

on June 4, 2010. At the time it had contracts for 300 jurisdictions in 16 states through its BPS, WinEDS, Edge, Edge2, Advantage, Insight, InsightPlus and 400C systems. In Feb. 2014 Sequoia filed a bankruptcy petition under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code.

Company history

Sequoia Voting Systems began as Mathematical Systems Corporation of

Anaheim, California Anaheim ( ) is a city in northern Orange County, California, part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. As of the 2020 United States Census, the city had a population of 346,824, making it the most populous city in Orange County, the 10th-most p ...

, the developers of a punched-card voting system that served as an alternative to the Votomatic. Some time around 1970, Diamond National Corporation (the

holding company A holding company is a company whose primary business is holding a controlling interest in the securities of other companies. A holding company usually does not produce goods or services itself. Its purpose is to own shares of other companies ...

that grew from the

Diamond Match Company The Diamond Match Company has its roots in several nineteenth century companies. In the early 1850s, Edward Tatnall of Wilmington, Delaware was given an English recipe for making matches by a business acquaintance, William R. Smith. In 1853, Tatn ...

) 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. 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. By the time Sequoia bought the AVM voting business, the AVM Automatic Voting Computer (AVC) was ready for market. Under Sequoia ownership, the AVC was certified for use in several states in 1986 and 1987, and with sleek new packaging, it went to market as the Sequoia AVC Advantage

DRE voting machine A DRE voting machine, or direct-recording electronic voting machine, records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter. These are typically buttons or a touchsc ...

in 1990.

Business Week ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

considered the AVC Advantage to be one of the high points in

industrial design Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical Product (business), products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advan ...

for the decade of the 1990s and credited it with turning the company around. SequoiaOptechEagle

In late 1997, Sequoia obtained the intellectual property rights to the Optech line of from Business Records Corporation. This transfer was a consequence of

antitrust Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust l ...

action taken by the

United States Department of Justice The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United State ...

when American Information Systems

merged Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...

with the Election Services Division of Business Records Corporation to form Election Systems & Software. After this merger ES&S retained the right to sell and service Optech scanners to existing customers; as a result, the ES&S Optech IV-C and the Sequoia Optech 400-C, for example, are essentially the same device.Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 4.2 on, page 66. In early 2002

De La Rue De La Rue plc (, ) is a British company headquartered in Basingstoke, England, that designs and produces banknotes, secure polymer substrate and banknote security features (including security holograms, security threads and security printe ...

, a

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

currency paper printing and security company took over ownership from Smurfit for $23 million. After losing money for several years, on March 8, 2005, Sequoia was acquired by

Smartmatic Smartmatic (also referred as Smartmatic Corp. or Smartmatic International) or Smartmatic SGO Group is a multinational company that builds and implements electronic voting systems. The company also produces smart cities solutions (including publ ...

, a multi-national technology company founded by three Venezuelan software engineers, which had developed advanced election systems, including voting machines. Smartmatic machines and software were used in the

2004 Venezuelan recall referendum The Venezuelan recall referendum of 15 August 2004 was a referendum to determine whether Hugo Chávez, then President of Venezuela, should be recalled from office. The recall referendum was announced on 8 June 2004 by the National Electoral Co ...

, which resulted in two studies, an exit pollBarone, M.
"Exit polls in Venezuela".
''U.S. News & World Report.'' 20 August 2004. and

cluster analysis Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). It is a main task of ...

,Maria M. Febres Cordero and Bernardo Márquez (2006), "A Statistical Approach to Assess Referendum Results: the Venezuelan Recall Referendum 2004", ''International Statistical Review'', 74(3)
abstract
indicating "massive fraud" that flipped the result in favor of dictator

Hugo Chávez Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (; 28 July 1954 – 5 March 2013) was a Venezuelan politician who was president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, except for a brief period in 2002. Chávez was also leader of the Fifth Republ ...

. In November 2007, following a verdict by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (

CFIUS The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS, commonly pronounced "Cifius" ) is an inter-agency committee of the United States government that reviews the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies ...

), Smartmatic was ordered to sell Sequoia, which it did to its Sequoia managers having U.S. citizenship.

Controversies

California decertification/recertification

On August 3, 2007, California Secretary of State

Debra Bowen Debra Lynn Bowen (born October 27, 1955) is an American attorney and politician who served as the Secretary of State of California from 2007 to 2015. Previously, she was a member of the California State Legislature from 1992 to 2006. In March 20 ...

withdrew approval and granted conditional reapproval to Sequoia Voting Systems optical scan and

s after a "review of the voting machines certified for use in California in March 2007" found "significant security weaknesses throughout the Sequoia system" and "pervasive structural weaknesses" which raise "serious questions as to whether the Sequoia software can be relied upon to protect the integrity of elections."

“Hanging chads" controversy

A 2007 investigative report by

Dan Rather Daniel Irvin Rather Jr. (; born October 31, 1931) is an American journalist, commentator, and former national evening news anchor. Rather began his career in Texas, becoming a national name after his reporting saved thousands of lives during Hurr ...

charged Sequoia with deliberately supplying poor quality punch-card ballots to

Palm Beach County Palm Beach County is a county located in the southeastern part of Florida and lies directly north of Broward County and Miami-Dade County. The county had a population of 1,492,191 as of the 2020 census, making it the third-most populous county ...

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

for the 2000 election. According to former Sequoia employees, the ballots for Palm Beach County were produced with paper and manufacturing processes that were outside of normal specifications. This supposedly caused all of the problems with "hanging chads". When quality problems were found, Sequoia management ordered the production workers to ignore them. One worker speculated that the object was to discredit punch-card ballots and thus promote sales of electronic voting machines.

Florida touch-screen replacement

After the 2000 election problems, Florida required its counties to replace punch-card voting systems with touch-screen systems, some of which were purchased from Sequoia. However, there were some major problems with touch-screen systems, and in 2007 Florida ordered the counties to replace them with optical-scan systems by 1 July 2008. Sequoia offered to buy back its machines for $1 each. This offer was rejected.

Threat of legal action against Professor Edward Felten

In early 2008, New Jersey election officials announced that they planned to send one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines to Professors

Edward Felten Edward William Felten (born March 25, 1963) is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he was also the Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy from 2007 to 2015 and fr ...

and

Andrew Appel Andrew Wilson Appel (born 1960) is the Eugene Higgins Professor of computer science at Princeton University. He is especially well-known because of his compiler books, the ''Modern Compiler Implementation in ML'' () series, as well as ''Compili ...

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

for analysis. Felten and Appel are

computer scientists Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (including th ...

interested in security issues, especially in regard to electronic voting systems. In March 2008, Sequoia sent an e-mail to Professor Felten asserting that allowing him to examine Sequoia voting machines would violate the license agreement between Sequoia and the county which bought them, and also that Sequoia would take legal action "to stop... non-compliant analysis... publication of Sequoia software... or any other infringement of our intellectual property." This action sparked outrage among computer technology activists. Author and digital rights activist

Cory Doctorow Cory Efram Doctorow (; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog ''Boing Boing''. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of ...

commented "It's hard to imagine a stupider legal threat." Shortly after this, Sequoia's corporate Web site was hacked. Ironically, the hack was first discovered by Ed Felten. Sequoia took its Web site down on 20 March and removed the "intrusive content".

The Avante Lawsuit

In June 2006, Sequoia Voting Systems, along with

Diebold Diebold Nixdorf is an American multinational financial and retail technology company that specializes in the sale, manufacture, installation and service of self-service transaction systems (such as ATMs and currency processing systems), point ...

and ES&S:, were

sued - A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil acti ...

: by a small, virtually unknown

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

technology company called 'Avante', alleging infringement of two of its patents covering DREs (Direct Recording Electronic voting machines) and Optical Scanners. The lawsuit demands that the three companies a) are prohibited permanently to sell all their “infringing” equipment; b) recall all “infringing” equipment; c) destroy or deliver to Avante the “infringing” equipment; d) award “infringement” damages to Avante including treble damages for "willful infringement". Sequoia Voting Systems, in particular, was sued for its Edge, Advantage, 400C, VeriVote Printer (VVPAT) and Insight machines (that is, for all of its products except one). The other two companies were sued for almost all of their products.

Smartmatic's continuing interests in Sequoia

On August 26, 2005, Sequoia Voting Systems announced that Mr. Jack Blaine would serve in the dual role as President of Sequoia Voting Systems and President of Sequoia's parent company, Smartmatic. In April 2008, competitor

Hart InterCivic Hart InterCivic Inc. is a privately held United States company that provides election technologies and services to government jurisdictions. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Hart products are used by hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide, including co ...

attempted a hostile takeover of Sequoia. Court documents unearthed at this time revealed that

still retained some financial control over several aspects of Sequoia. At the time, Smartmatic held a $2 million note from SVS Holdings, Inc., the management team which purchased the company from Smartmatic. In accordance to the acquisition contract, Smartmatic also retains ownership of

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

rights for some of Sequoia's currently deployed election products in the United States, and holds the right to negotiate overseas non-compete agreements. Among other bidders, Smartmatic and Sequoia were competitors for the contract to provide voting machines and services to the 2010 national elections in the

Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

, one of the largest contracts ever in the voting technology industry. In the bidding process Sequoia was disqualified early, while Smartmatic was declared the winner.

Acquisition by Dominion Voting Systems

On June 4, 2010

, a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

company engaged in manufacturing electronic voting hardware and optical scanners, acquired all physical and intellectual assets of Sequoia Voting Systems as well as retained technical and sales staff.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Company WebsiteSmartmatic Electronic Voting Systems
Election technology companies Companies based in Oakland, California 2010 mergers and acquisitions Electronic voting companies