Sequoia Voting Systems

[7] Business Week considered the AVC Advantage to be one of the high points in industrial design for the decade of the 1990s and credited it with turning the company around.

[8] In late 1997, Sequoia obtained the intellectual property rights to the Optech line of ballot scanners from Business Records Corporation.

[9][10] In early 2002 De La Rue, a British currency paper printing and security company took over ownership from Smurfit for $23 million.

[11] After losing money for several years, on March 8, 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, a multi-national technology company founded by three Venezuelan software engineers, which had developed advanced election systems, including voting machines.

"[16] A 2007 investigative report by Dan Rather charged Sequoia with deliberately supplying poor quality punch-card ballots to Palm Beach County, Florida, 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.

One worker speculated that the object was to discredit punch-card ballots and thus promote sales of electronic voting machines.

[18] In early 2008, New Jersey election officials announced that they planned to send one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines to Professors Edward Felten and Andrew Appel of Princeton University for analysis.

Felten and Appel are computer scientists interested in security issues, especially in regard to electronic voting systems.

[20] Author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow commented "It's hard to imagine a stupider legal threat.

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).