Driven by a deep and abiding faith that you can find anything on the web
nowadays, I've spent the last 24 hours trying to find the manufacturer of the
voting machines that Mike Church and I described in somewhat glowing terms
yesterday.

However, there are times when a web search becomes exceedingly difficult, as
it did in this instance: there are tens of thousands of local electoral board
web pages *discussing* voting machines, virtually all of them without
reference to the brand names of the products they use. Because of that
fruitlessness, I was ready to throw in the towel trying to find the original
manufacturer's web page. Ultimately, what allowed me to find the proper
manufacturer was by my going to AltaVista and doing a web search on *images*
of voting machines.

Given my difficulties in finding this information, I now humbly submit that
everyone immediately drop what you're doing and click on:

     http://www.spve.com/products/avc_advantage.html

All kidding aside, this is a very well designed instrument, and I am
impressed by it. Indeed, it has won several design awards. The AVC Advantage
voting machine was introduced in 1988, and to the best of my rememberances,
that's just about how long we've been using them here locally. Because of the
nature of the machine's design, none of the contentious arguments about
pregnant- and dimpled-chad or overpunching that are now raging in Florida can
occur with this device.*

Sequoia Pacific, the company that makes these devices, has just now released
a replacement model, this time based on a touch-screen CRT:

     http://www.spve.com/products/avc_edge.html

that is supposed to be even easier and more certain to use.

Given the public attention that has been given to the failure of the punched
paper ballot over the past week, no matter its form, if Sequoia Pacific were
a publicly traded company (and I find no information that suggests that they
are), it would very likely be a very good investment over the next few years.

You can't publicity for the argument for better voting methods than that that
has occurred during the last week.

Wirt Atmar

*However, that doesn't preclude other forms of screw-ups. The county clerk
for the Dona Ana County, New Mexico, where I reside, just found a tabulating
error in a state-wide recount. As that recount was proceeding, Bush slowly
crept ahead, first 4 votes up, then 17, and ultimately finishing with a
decisive 126 votes. And then, just last night, they found that the 600 votes
for Gore in one precinct here right here in Las Cruces had been transcribed
and written down as 100, one person not being able to read another's writing.
So, it now appears that New Mexico is firmly back in Gore's column, winning
the state in a landslide, with 375 votes.