Help with Vendor: Advanced Voting Solutions

I need some links in a hurry on this one. Please help.

Anything enlightening on Advanced Voting Solutions.

I know that it used to be Shoup and that it was populated by some Diebold
people a while ago.

I would be most grateful:)

Thanks

snip>
Advanced Voting Solutions is the new name of another voting company, Shoup Voting Solutions. Their current top management, Howard Van Pelt and Larry Ensminger, were executives for Diebold-Global until last year. Officers of Shoup Voting Machine Co. were indicted for allegedly bribing politicians in Tampa, Florida in 1971, according to the San Francisco Business Times. Ransom Shoup was convicted in 1979 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to an FBI inquiry into a lever machine-counted election in Philadelphia. Shoup got a three-year suspended sentence. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has bought new voting machines from Danaher-Guardian, which appears to only sell voting machines formerly known as the "Shouptronic."

Danaher-Guardian is owned by billionaire brothers Steven M. and Mitchell P. Rales, who were described by columnist Jack Anderson in 1988 as "a pair of corporate raiders out of Washington DC." Again, Danaher-Guardian appears to only sell formerly Shouptronic voting machines.

Diebold-Global's current president, Bob Urosevich, was the co-founder of American Information Systems which became ES&S. As mentioned before, Diebold-Global's top managers, Howard Van Pelt and Larry Ensminger, recently moved to Advanced Voting Solutions-Shoup.

http://www.ecotalk.org/PressRelease.htm

Here's the Hoover Report

Advanced Voting Solutions (AVS) develops hardware and software systems for the secure electronic tallying of ballots. Its products include touch-screen voting equipment and applications for managing the voting process. The company was established in 2001 by CEO Howard Van Pelt, who sold his previous business, Global Election Systems, to Diebold, which renamed the business Diebold Election Systems. AVS was once known as Shoup Voting Solutions, a company that manufactured mechanical voting equipment. Shoup got out of the equipment manufacturing business in 1992 and was involved in servicing its installed equipment. The voting equipment repair firm, founded in 1911, is now known as Elections USA Inc. by Shoup.

Hoover's Report

on edit: FWIW (Unknown validity): "Advanced Voting Solutions was sued by Virginia’s Republican Party after nearly a dozen of its touch-screen voting machines malfunctioned there in the November 4, 2003 elections."

http://www.amherst.edu/~daschaich/writings/rant/article.html

AVS is here: http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=78&Itemid=173

Advanced Voting Solutions
Advanced Voting Solutions, Inc.
2401 Internet Blvd., Ste. 111
Frisco, TX 75034
Phone: 972-731-8901
Fax: 972-731-8945


Advanced Voting Solutions (AVS) develops hardware and software systems for the electronic tallying of ballots. Its products include the WINvote touchscreen voting machine and applications for managing the voting process. The company was established in 2001 by CEO Howard Van Pelt, who sold his previous business, Global Election Systems, to Diebold, which renamed the business Diebold Election Systems. AVS was once known as Shoup Voting Solutions, a company that manufactured mechanical voting equipment. Shoup got out of the equipment manufacturing business in 1992 and was involved in servicing its installed equipment. The voting equipment repair firm, founded in 1911, is now known as Elections USA Inc. by Shoup.


<snip>
More resources and articles at the link above.

...uses wireless to communicate between its voting stations. "WIN" in WINvote stands for wireless information network.

Their sales rep, Kimberlee Shoup-Yeahl, was at a Voting System Expo in Wilkes-Barre PA last summer and told me that as a Pollworker I would really like their system because, for example, I could take the machine out to a disabled voter's car (no matter that curbside voting is not legal in PA) and it can "beam the votes" back into the poll.

My own thought was, and still is, if I as a pollworker can beam votes into the poll, who else can???

Not to mention eavesdropping, radio interference, and radio jamming possibilties.

Oh yes, while Ms. Shoup-Yeahl was showing it to me, the WINvote crashed and she had to reboot it. Just for a second, I saw "Welcome to Windows" (I think XP) flash on the screen, so I asked, "oh... so this runs on Windows?" And she looked sort of sheepish and said, "Um yes...." And quickly added, "but we're porting it to Linux -- soon."

Yikes, this is one scary machine.

http://philly1.phillymag.com/Archives/2001May/clan.html

And this is all related to what we are fighting in Pennsylvania:
http://www.phillymag.com/Archives/2001May/votingsidebar.html

For WHATEVER reason, Philly bought these old Shouptronics and now they want to pay for them with their HAVA money. They are using their status as the 10,000-pound gorilla of the Keystone State to fight our VVPB bills and anything to do with voter-verified paper. (And ES & S is hanging around to gobble up the spoils of the fight in the outer counties with their paperless iVotronics.)

Heaven help us.

try PM'ing him.

Last year VoteHere announced its partnership with Advanced Voting Solutions of Frisco Texas, run by Howard Van Pelt, who used to run Global Elections, which was bought out by Diebold, and who used to be CEO of Diebold, and who used to be President of the scandal ridden Shoup Voting Solutions which, as all good election companies do when bad press visits them, changed its name to Advanced Voting Solutions. Officers of Shoup Voting were indicted for allegedly bribing politicians in—of all places-- Florida, according to the San Francisco Business Times. In 1979, Ransom Shoup himself was convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to an FBI inquiry into a lever machine-counted election in Philadelphia. Shoup got a three-year suspended sentence.

The election industry is oh so cozy...

Van Pelt had previously spoken out against paper trail verification citing that the printers could “break down” and therefore it was not a viable idea. This argument has gained a good deal of traction in the status quo crowd.

Some problems were reported in 2003 by voters using Advanced’s WINvote TouchScreens in Fairfax County. Problems where the voter would press the X by the candidate’s name to vote, and the X would just disappear making it impossible to vote for that particular candidate. Repeatedly. Along with that glitch, there was the classic overload of the main server...the Tabulator, when the polls closed in the evening and the precincts were transmitting their votes into the County. The Witching Hour. More than half of precincts resorted to using the telephone to post results. Here we go again

What did Mr. Van Pelt have to say about it? "In every single election in the world that has ever been run, none has run perfectly," he said. Ah yes, the favorite ‘imperfection’ argument.

And no election equipment company’s story would be complete without its token whistleblower coming forth to tell all. VoteHere is no exception to the rule. Their former test engineer, Dan Spillane, had identified over 250 security flaws in theVoteHere system and was subsequently fired. He must have missed the memo that flaws and substandard test results are supposed to be held in utmost secrecy in the election industry.... He filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the company in 2001.

...when Hedda Foil and I watched a demo of VoteHere last summer at NASS, they were using an AVS WINvote as their demo machine.

(The darn things always look really cheapo and like they are falling apart to me!)

The Fairfax situation was interesting. The Republicans felt they were the agrieved party and demanded a look at the source code. A Republican Delegate is actually head of VA VerifiedVoting.Org. Strange.

Nevertheless, I suspect that AVC has a strong right-Republican bias. That's one piece of the puzzle that would help.

Thanks for this.

surprise!

The WINVote changed 1 out of every 100 votes from the
republican candidate to the democrat.

Please remember, we wouldn't be buying these hackable machines if
it weren't for the complicity of democrats.

That is why it is so hard to get rid of the machines, there are democrats
who want to use them to rig the vote too.

Fraud and corruption is not limited to one political party.

If it was, and Dems were corruption free, we wouldn't be so weak.

Democrat SOS of Georgia Kathy Cox sold her state down the river,
and fellow dems are protecting her so she can be annointed Governor
by Diebold next.

If Dems did what they were supposed to do, we wouldn't have to fight
so hard.

let them take out Kevin Shelley when he seriously took on Diebold and decertified the TSX there. What I can't figure out is if the Dems are rigging elections with the voting machines or if they are just getting paid off. The elections always favor the repubs. What would be the motivation of the Dems for that, unless they are just DINO's, other than bribes and payoff? You are absolutely right; the Dems have been complicit in far too many instances. New Mexico, CA... have you read www.whoscounting.net ?
Lots of stuff on Dem complicity.

Indeed, the Republican Party was the one crying foul.

And, the offshoot was that US Rep Tom Davis, R, got on the bandwagon for verified voting.

I'll look up some of the articles.


By the way, Frisco, Texas, home of Advanced Voting Solutions, is just down the road from McKinney, Texas, home of Diebold's election division.

Initially, the Republicans in Fairfax County were concerned because broken machines would be taken to a central location, worked on, and then put BACK into service on election day. But, then other stuff became apparent -- the more they looked, the more problems they found (sound familiar?). Basically, the machines (lacking paper printers) were reported to be vote hopping, breaking, and a test showed them losing 1 of 100 votes for a certain candidate.

Just down the road from Diebold, how conveeenient! as the Church Lady would say.

What a mess and it's been that way for a long time.

I'd like to see Davis pull some strings but I think he'd need a teflon cord to get verified voting, in a real sense, out of the House. Always hope.