Thursday, April 06, 2006

With voting machine company now bankrupt, CEO speaks out:

No vendor "has a system that voters can trust"!
Straight from the horse's mouth


by Sean Greene, electionline.org

The market for voting systems has been a perilous one, especially for small companies. While firms can potentially land contracts to sell large numbers of systems to localities across the country looking to replace older voting machines, they must navigate a complex maze of state and federal certification procedures, endure local procurement fights, close scrutiny and meet demand for a large number of voting systems, sometimes in a severely compressed time schedule.

The realities of the market most recently took its toll on the voting-machine maker AccuPoll, which filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, leaving two counties in Texas using its products with no vendor support and a frustrated former CEO in its wake.

The company, which produced the AVS-1000, a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT)-equipped touch-screen machine, has ceased all operations.

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"I think that vendors outright misrepresent the robustness, stability, and security of their systems. You just have to look at the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances. I also wonder why the other vendors were so adamant in fighting a VVPAT system requirement. They spent much more in fighting it than in implementing it," he said.

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