|
Sequoia Voting Systems was a California-based company that is one of the largest providers of electronic voting systems in the U.S., having offices in Oakland, Denver and New York City. Some of its major competitors were Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) and Election Systems & Software. It was acquired by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems on June 4, 2010. At the time it had contracts for 300 jurisdictions in 16 states through its BPS, WinEDS, Edge, Edge2, Advantage, Insight, InsightPlus and 400C systems.〔http://www.dominionvoting.com/images/pdfs/DominionAcquiresSequoiaFinal.pdf〕 ==Company history== Sequoia Voting Systems began as Mathematical Systems Corporation of Anaheim, California, the developers of a punched-card voting system that served as an alternative to the Votomatic.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Votamatic )〕〔James Curtis Fielder, Pad Assembly, , granted Sept. 12, 1967.〕 Some time around 1970, Diamond National Corporation (the holding company that grew from the Diamond Match Company) acquired the company. In the 1970s, Diamond National became Diamond International, which was acquired and reorganized by Jefferson Smurfit, an Irish printing conglomerate, producing Smurfit Diamond Packaging Corporation. Diamond spun off its punched-card voting business in 1983 as Sequoia Pacific Systems Corporation.〔Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 3.1, particularly Figure 10 on, page 37.〕 In 1984, Sequoia purchased the voting machine business of AVM Corporation (the former Automatic Voting Machine Corporation) and was reorganized as Sequoia Voting Systems. AVM had its roots in a number of voting machine companies founded in the 1890s, but by the 1980s, most of its business was in other fields. Nonetheless, in the late 1950s, AVM had begun investing in the development of electronic voting machines.〔Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 5.1, particularly page 95.〕 By the time Sequoia bought the AVM voting business, the AVM Automatic Voting Computer (AVC) was ready for market. Under Sequoia ownership, the AVC was certified for use in several states in 1986 and 1987, and with sleek new packaging, it went to market as the Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine in 1990.〔Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 5.2.3, page 99 and Figure 30.〕 Business Week considered the AVC Advantage to be one of the high points in industrial design for the decade of the 1990s and credited it with turning the company around.〔Bruce Nussbaum, A Decade of Design: Silver Winners, (Business Week, Nov. 29, 1999 ).〕 In late 1997, Sequoia obtained the intellectual property rights to the Optech line of from Business Records Corporation. This transfer was a consequence of antitrust action taken by the United States Department of Justice when American Information Systems merged with the Election Services Division of Business Records Corporation to form Election Systems & Software. After this merger ES&S retained the right to sell and service Optech scanners to existing customers; as a result, the ES&S Optech IV-C and the Sequoia Optech 400-C, for example, are essentially the same device.〔Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 4.2 on, page 66.〕〔(Asset Purchase Agreement ), BRC Holdings, Inc., Dec. 3, 1997.〕 In early 2002 De La Rue, a British currency paper printing and security company took over ownership from Smurfit for $23 million.〔Sequoia Voting systems Receives Mandate from De La Rue, (Kiosk Marketplace ), May 29, 2002.〕 After losing money for several years, on March 8, 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, a multi-national technology company which had developed advanced election systems, voting machines included. Thereafter Smartmatic assigned a major portion of its development and managerial teams, dedicated to revamping some of Sequoia's old-fashioned, legacy voting machines, and replacing their technology with ''avant-garde'' proprietary features and developments, which resulted in new, high-tech products. As a result, Sequoia sold many new-generation election products and experienced a healthy financial resurrection during the fiscal years of 2006 and 2007. However in November 2007, following a verdict by the CFIUS, Smartmatic was ordered to sell Sequoia, which it did to its Sequoia managers having U.S. citizenship. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sequoia Voting Systems」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|