Permission granted to OpEdNews to post the following in its entirety with attribution to Rebecca Mercuri:
Colleagues,
I am writing to draw your attention to the Avante lawsuit that stands poised to derail much of the VVPAT legislation that many have worked so hard to put in place for the upcoming election cycles. In particular, the Avante filing includes a request for damages, injunctive relief, a jury trial, and asks that the Court enter a judgment that includes (among other requested remedies):
1) Permanently enjoining the sale of all infringing equipment produced by Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S; 2) Recalling all infringing equipment; 3) Destroying or delivering to Avante the infringing equipment; 4) Awarding infringement damages to Avante including treble damages for willful infringement.
The suit alleges that the infringements include both DREs and Opscan equipment. Specifically mentioned are the Diebold AccuVote TS, AccuVote TSX and AccuVote OS, the Sequoia AVC Edge, VeriVote Printer, AVC Advantage, Optical Scan 400C and Optech Insight, and the ES&S iVotronic, iVotronic LS, Real Time Audit Log, AutoMARK, Model 100 Precinct Ballot Counter and the Model 650 Central Ballot Counter.
The ramifications of this lawsuit are such that VVPATs may not be available in time to comply with the state laws, that the defendant vendors may allow this lawsuit to further delay their certification processes for the add-on ballot printers or other updated equipment, and that municipalities might need to prepare for the possibility that their opscan and DRE equipment may be decommissioned. I hope that you will take the time to digest and disseminate this important information. If further details are needed, I am available for comment.
Rebecca Mercuri has been in the forefront of the voting integrity movement since 1989. She provides expert witness services for elections and other forensic computing matters.
The OpEdNews website seems to want to change the case of the URL contents! Fie! The correction should be that /avante/ (the first instance of the word "avante") in each of the URLs should instead be /Avante/ (that is, "Avante" with a capital A).
Hope this gets across correctly!
R. Mercuri
by
Rebecca Mercuri (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments)
on Thursday, October 5, 2006 at 10:30:35 AM
