Northampton wins $1.7 million voting machine judgment

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Northampton wins $1.7 million voting machine judgment
County doubts it'll collect from Advanced Voting Solutions
By Tom Coombe | Of The Morning Call
January 31, 2009
Northampton County won a nearly $2 million judgement Friday against a company that sold it faulty voting machines in 2006.

Just don't look for the county to collect the money any time soon.

Following a brief hearing in county court, Judge Stephen Baratta said Advanced Voting Solutions of Frisco, Texas, must pay $1.9 million, plus court costs and interest, to the county. Now the county needs to figure out how to get money from a company that seems to have vanished.

''It's sort of a shallow victory,'' said county Administration Director John Conklin, who attended the hearing. ''It puts it to bed.''

...The county sued AVS in December 2007 after the machines -- which contained a glitch that would not allow them to be programmed to handle certain candidates -- were decertified by the Pennsylvania Department of State. The machines have sat unused in a county storeroom since 2007.
...
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-b7_3machines.6765210jan31,0,7902281.story

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. Isn't this interesting?

I have family in Northampton, so you caught my eye.

Great that the county stayed on it and went forth to get that default judgment.

Now, won't it be fun - I hope they follow through - to start tracking AVS and figure out who they were and who was funding them?

It's small stuff like this - a security guard notices a piece of tape on a door in the Watergate office area - that can lead to gigantic results. I hope this is one of them.

Thanks for this.

:toast:

[Stevepol]

2. I've never heard of a vendor winning a judgment against a county or precinct.

Maybe somebody has head of such a case. I haven't.

I believe, if more counties had the courage to sue and call the bluff of these vendors, they'd win at least as much or more. Diebold has lost several cases in CA, Micro-Vote has lost at least a million in PA.

It's not as if there aren't more than enough reasons to sue. Every election cycle, the machines fail to work or miscount or otherwise screw up an election or prove to have been illegally sold or wrongly patched or misrepresented in sales descriptions.

The vendors invariably blame the elections officials, but wherever the officials have the guts to sue, Diebold et al. lose.

I personally think all the vendors are as crooked as Advanced Voting Systems of Frisco, TX. Every one of them.

[tbyg52]

3. If all the rest of them got sued, would they disappear too?

Works for me. Then toss the non-supported machines on the junkpile.