E-Voting Vendor Sequoia’s Website Hacked

Sequoia Voting Systems, the retailer company, whose e-voting machines had recently come under fire from election officials in New Jersey confirmed that its site had been hacked on Thursday.

Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman for Sequoia said that the company took action as soon as it realized what had happened and removed the “intrusive content.” She added that the company took further security measures and added “security enhancements” to protect the website from similar attacks.

The hack was first noticed on Thursday morning by Ed Felten, a Princeton computer science professor and a critic of e-voting systems, who had been recently asked by a group representing New Jersey county clerks to examine Sequoia machines which were used in a Feb. 5 New Jersey presidential primary election.

Felten said that at around 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time, the Ballot Blog page on SequoiaVote.com which contained information from Sequoia regarding what had gone wrong in the New Jersey election was replaced with a message saying it had been hacked.

As of Thursday afternoon the blog site was available only on and off and the site was later taken offline by its Web-hosting provider and redirected to a hosting-provider page that said the page had been suspended temporarily for maintenance.

Sequoia has recently come under the scanner for discrepancies in the voting tallies generated by approximately 60 of the state's Sequoia Voting Systems AVC Advantage e-voting machines during last month's election.

Sequoia however, blames the discrepancy on poll worker error and said the problem could be fixed with a software update. But the state clerks were not satisfied and requested a third-party investigation.

The clerks group asked Felten to examine the Sequoia machines last Tuesday. However, Sequoia contacted Felten last Friday and threatened legal action against him, saying that such a review would violate the company's licensing agreement. Due to this Felten did not carry out his investigation.

Sequoia has claimed that it has all the rights to try to protect its intellectual property, and in this case, avoid the violation of their licensing agreement.

Regarding the New Jersey discrepancies, the company’s spokeswoman said that Sequoia undertook its own independent review with the help of Kwaidan Consulting of Houston and some other Election Assistance Commission (EAC)-accredited Voting System Test Laboratories.