Sequoia Voting Machine Analysis
In early 2008, New Jersey election officials announced that they planned to send one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines to Ed Felten and Andrew Appel (also of Princeton University) for analysis. 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 any non-compliant analysis, publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property." This action sparked outrage among computer technology activists.
After examining Sequoia's machines, Felten and Appel indeed discovered grave problems with the accuracy of the machines. They also demonstrated that the machines can be hacked and compromised within minutes.
Shortly after that, 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."
Read more about this topic: Edward Felten
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