Mailbox - Credit: stephoto on Flickr (CC BY SA)
Sequoia Voting Systems has failed to deliver 18,000 ballots in Colorado.
Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the top four voting machine vendors in the country, failed to print and deliver more than 18,000 absentee ballots to Denver County, Colorado, even though the company had assured officials the ballots were delivered, according to the Denver Post.
California-based Sequoia has a $742,000 contract with the county to print the ballots. Sequoia had told officials it sent some 21,000 ballots to a Denver postal facility on October 16, but postal officials said only about half that number arrived.
Officials learned ony over the weekend of October 25nd that Sequoia had failed to print and send the remaining ballots after voters started calling the election office complaining that their ballots hadn’t arrived in the mail. Sequoia insisted that all of the ballots had been sent until election officials pressed the company to check its records. The company finally acknowledged that some 11,000 ballots had not been shipped as stated. Shortly thereafter, the number of missing ballots rose to 18,000. Sequoia sent the missing ballots last week, and Denver County voters have been told that they’re allowed to turn in their mail-in ballots in person at any polling location on Election Day.
These voting machine companies are pathetic. This may or may not be a software error, like problems that we have seen previously from Sequoia, but in the case that it is, it just puts more weight into the argument that the government should not be using the services of companies that refuse to release their source code.