Sequoia Voting Co. Fed Florida 2000 Vote Trouble

The management of the Sequoia Voting Systems company willfully sent lousy punch cards to Florida for its 2000 general election.x10 Last August, HDNet’s Dan Rather Reports aired that story, which gives an answer to why so many card ballots did not have a single, clean punch for president.x11 Sequoia management switched from their reliable card stock suppliers, recycled rejected paper rolls, and tried to hide the fact with xeroxed labels and seemingly fraudulent shipping documents. Management overrode workers’ quality control tries, ordered the chads of ballots for Palm Beach County—where 10,000 ballots (1 in 45) had no punch for president—to be misaligned, and after the election tried to destroy all evidence. In the wake of Florida’s (aborted) manual recount and its pictures of hanging chads, election boards across the nation scrapped punch card systems, and Sequoia went on to sell high-priced touch screen voting systems—including to Palm Beach County. While many blogs covered this story, few, if any, major news outfits did—and a half-year later, I can find no sign of a Congressional or criminal investigation, nor a civil suit.x12

Seven former Sequoia workers, with a combined 161 years with the company, appeared on the news show to tell the story.