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
Famous quotes containing the words voting, machine and/or analysis:
“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)