Reply #5: here [View All]

[FogerRox]

Source: The Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, FL), March 10, 2005
p2C.

Title: BOCA FIRM BUYS MAKER OF COUNTY VOTE MACHINES.(LOCAL)
Author: George Bennett

Electronic Collection: CJ130183885
RN: CJ130183885


Full Text COPYRIGHT 2005 The Palm Beach Post

Byline: GEORGE BENNETT, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

The company that made Palm Beach County's touch-screen voting machines
has
been purchased by a Boca Raton firm that made the machines used in last
year's
disputed Venezuelan recall election.

Sequoia Voting Systems was acquired Wednesday by Smartmatic Corp.,
which has
its headquarters and about 15 employees in Arvida Park of Commerce.
Terms of
the deal weren't announced.

Sequoia was previously owned by U.K.-based De La Rue PLC.

Sequoia has sold about 4,400 touch screens to Palm Beach County over
the past
three years and prints the county's paper absentee and provisional
ballots. It
provides occasional technical assistance, most recently in November,
when two
Sequoia employees were in Palm Beach County for the presidential
election.

The change in ownership shouldn't make any short-term difference to
county
voters, officials from Sequoia and Smartmatic said.

Sequoia will continue its plans to seek state certification for a
printer that
produces verifiable paper ballots to accompany its paperless,
touch-screen
machines, Sequoia Vice President Alfie Charles said.

Over the long term, Smartmatic President Jack Blaine said, the deal
adds
research and development capability to Sequoia while giving Smartmatic
a
foothold in the U.S. elections market.

Smartmatic, which Blaine said has more than $100 million in annual
sales, has
sold electronic voting machines in Venezuela and other Latin American
countries.

After leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez kept his job in an
August
recall election, the opposition accused the Chavez regime of using the
Smartmatic machines to rig the outcome. Smartmatic vehemently disputed
the
claims and former President Jimmy Carter's international Carter Center
said it
believed the results were accurate.