Reply #6: CA: Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors Chooses Promises Over Evidence [View All]

[Wilms]

Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors Chooses Promises Over Evidence

Media Release

For Immediate Release

Contact:
John Gideon, Information Manager
[e-mail]
[phone]

Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors Chooses Promises Over Evidence

19 October 2005 - The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors agreed yesterday to allow the County Clerk, Gail Pellerin, to enter into a contract with Sequoia Voting Systems, a recently purchased subsidiary of Smartmatic, Inc. which is a Florida-registered, Venezuelan-owned, company.

The 94-page report Pellerin presented to the Board contains 69 pages of information supplied by citizen opponents of the purchase, including documented failures of the systems in past elections, analyses showing the higher operating cost of the system, and testimony by disabled individuals explaining the difficulties they had using the system.

Read the report here:

http://sccounty01.co.santa-cruz.ca.us/bds/Govstream/BDSvData/non_legacy/agendas/2005/20051018/PDF/047.pdf

One member of the Public Advisory Committee established to provide counsel to the current voting systems evaluation and selection process states the following reasons why the Sequoia system is not a good choice:

• It is only conditionally certified in California and is not certified for the primary election.
• It currently provides no features to allow manually disabled individuals to vote independently as required by HAVA.
• Blind voters have complained about the audio interface of the Sequoia DRE since 2004, and while Sequoia promised at that time to fix those problems, it has not yet done so.

snip/more

Thanks to JohnGideon

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x397627