10/21/2009<br />Statement from Sequoia Voting Systems regarding Source Code Claims by the Election Defense Alliance<br /><br />We issued the following statement today areter receiving a few questions on this matter so I wanted to highlight it on our blog so it would easily be seen by all who are curious.<BR><BR>+++++++++++++++++++<BR><BR><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Statement from Sequoia Voting Systems regarding Source Code Claims by the Election Defense Alliance</SPAN><BR><BR>It has come to our attention that there are several blog postings regarding the possession of Sequoia’s source code by the "Election Defense Alliance" and we would like to address those claims.<BR><BR>Sequoia routinely assists our customers in responding to requests for information from the public regarding our source code and election data. We often provide election databases that remove all Sequoia copyrighted proprietary information leaving only data and log information. However, in a recent instance in Riverside County, California, we did remove the proprietary information but did not thoroughly redact it, leaving text base remnants of various database level code related to various operations including portions of stored procedures and schema creation code.<BR><BR>There was no source code related to the voting machines – the code that actually counts votes – released or any front-end Election Management System code. Essentially only small portions of ballot layout, accumulation and reporting code were present in this database that Sequoia provided to Riverside County.<BR><BR>The version of our code discussed above is WinEDS v. 3.1.12, which is not the most recent iteration of Sequoia’s voting system source code. WinEDS 3.1.12 was federally certified in January 2006 by the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), which was the federal certification authority at that time. This code has been thoroughly tested – including a line-by-line review of all source code including the voting machine, database, and front-end code by NASED’s Independent Testing Authorities (ITAs) labs that were part of the NASED certification process.<BR><BR>Additionally, this code was tested and reviewed during the California Secretary of State’s Top-To-Bottom-Review (TTBR) of the State’s voting systems.<BR><BR>More recent iterations of Sequoia’s source code starting with WinEDS version 3.1.074 encrypts all of this code within the database which prevents this type of situation.<BR><BR>Considering the thoroughness of the CA TTBR, it is unlikely that any new revelations will be revealed by further analysis of this limited code released.<BR><BR>Sequoia regrets this error as we work diligently to protect our existing proprietary copyrighted material.<BR><BR>###<br /><br /> - Michelle Shafer, VP of Communications & External Affairs<br /><br />
