Judge Orders Mandatory Testing of Machines After Company Previously Threatened Legal Action Against Princeton Professors if They Dared To Examine Machines...

Brad Friedman Byon 4/8/2008, 4:21pm PT

Just out from the NJ Star-Ledger...

Subpoenas were issued in six New Jersey counties today, demanding that officials turn over for testing all voting machines where discrepancies were found in the presidential primary tallies. Election officials in Bergen, Gloucester, Mercer, Middlesex, Ocean and Union counties were instructed to turn over the machines by April 15. Activists trying to persuade Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg that electronic voting machines should be discarded succeeded in convincing her that examining these counties' machines is critical to their case. "In order to succeed in our case and show Sequoia machines are insecure and can be hacked into, we need to look at these machines," Venetis argued. Clerks in the six counties uncovered discrepancies in 60 machines when they doubled check the vote tallies after the Feb. 5 presidential primary. Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman for Sequoia in California, said her company would try to have the subpoenas quashed. But no motions were filed today with Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg, who is presiding over the case in Trenton.

In the meantime, we repeat our background detail on this amazing (and sometimes hilarious) story in full below, as we ran it this weekend when one of the Princeton professors threatened by Sequoia found the failures in NJ were even worse than previously thought.

Please note: The same failed Sequoia AVC Advantage touch-screens are scheduled for use in Pennsylvania in the important upcoming Democratic Primary!...

On Super Tuesday, Sequoia's AVC Advantage touch-screen voting machines failed to boot up in many places, forcing the Governor himself to wait 45 minutes before he could cast his vote. After Super Tuesday it was found that the Sequoia AVC Advantage has misreported voter turnouts.

Sequoia offered a feeble excuse for the failure, without offering evidence to support it, which blamed both voters and poll-workers instead of themselves for the multi-million dollar embarrassment. County election officials across NJ then unanimously called for an independent investigation of the machines by Princeton computer profs Felten and Andrew Appel.

Sequoia then threatened legal action against both the professors and the counties should they undertake such a technical review of their self-described "tamperproof" machines. The counties folded to the company's strong-arm tactics, while hoping either the state AG or SoS would commission such a review.

Sequoia's website was then hacked, but not before they could release misleading propaganda claiming they loved third party independent reviews so much they were willing to then sponsor one on their own by selecting and paying an unknown "independent company" named "Kwaidan Consulting" to do one on behalf of Sequoia.

Kwaidan was then revealed by The BRAD BLOG to be no more than a "blonde nymphomaniac"-seeking babe-magnet named Mike Gibbons, who, after being commissioned by Sequoia for this important analysis, suddenly discovered a new-found love for George Bush, Jesus Christ, Albert Einstein, and the U.S. Constitution. The babes and the Jim Beam would have to wait.

Much as those voters and election officials in Pennsylvania, set to use the exact same machines two weeks from now in the upcoming, all-important, Democratic Primary, will have to wait to see if the machines work at all. Then, of course, they will simply have to trust the reported results, no matter what the machines tell them, since it is strictly impossible to discern whether any single vote cast on them was actually recorded as any single voter intended.

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