Susan Bysiewicz: LHS Invented Our Voting Machines

Surprising information on Colin McEnroe. This is not what I have understood, yet I am always open to new information. <listen>

“We have a type of machine that was invented by LHS Associates in Massachusetts, twenty years ago” – Susan Bysiewicz, Secretary of the State, Connecticut

This is worth a bit of research. How can I doubt the word of a Constitutional Officer who evaluated and signed a $15 million dollar contract for our optical scanners? Perhaps UTC should check into the patent issue.

Looking at the book BlackBoxVoting, information is a bit sketchy but it seems that the Accuvote-OS may have been invented more recently, in the 2001 time-frame, and by Diebold and the company it purchased, Global Election Systems:

While Diebold was loaning money to Global, embezzler Jeffrey Dean remained a director of the company, and according to memos, was involved with the Windows CE system used in the touch-screens and the 1.96 series optical scan software

Now, somebody has this wrong – either Susan Bysiewicz or Bev Harris. Lets look at the statements of John Silvestro, President of LHS associates. Here are some excerpts from a transcript of his inverview with Dori Smith of TalkNationRadio:

John Silvestro: Yeah and I’ll tell you what LHS does. LHS is a, we are a service provider, that’s what we do. We provide services and the service we provide mainly is to municipalities. We do a number of things. We started out doing (cox?)…billing many years ago and then we got away from cox billing and we started doing census processing in Massachusetts. And that led into voter registration back computers were not readily accessible. We’ve been in business since 1972 I believe, we’re in our 35th year, and to a progression of what we were doing. We ended up in the election services business. We started selling optical scan machines in New England in 1985. Since 1985 we’ve just been selling optical scans. We at first were a representative of a company called Business Records Corporate which currently I guess would have morphed into ESS.

We were a distributor for Sequoia Pacifica which now is Sequoia Voting Systems and we were a distributor for them for I don’t know six or seven years, in the punch card business. And then in 1991 we signed on with global election systems and have been selling the Accuvote since 1992…

We don’t do software development here? None of my employees have computer science degrees, graduates, graduate students or anything like that. We’re just people who do a job based on a software that we have that allows us to code an election and create that coding on a memory card. And it’s really a fill in the blanks.

Checking more on BlackBoxVoting we find that in 1991, Diebold was not selling the Diebold AccuVote-OS, it did not yet exist and Diebold was not yet in the voting system business. Global Election systems was selling a predicessor optical scanner, so perhaps LHS was signed on as a distributor (After, I suspect, not much due dilligence):

In 1991, NAPT and Macrotrends were reorgainzed, and the name was changed to Global Election Systems. At this time, Michael K. Graye became a director, a position he held for two years. Earlier, Graye had misappropriated $18 million from four corporations, but the laws had not yet caught up with him. In 1996, Graye was arrested on charges of tax fraud, conspiracy to commit tax fraud, and money laundering…These founding partners…set upt Macrotrends, NAPT, and then Global Election Systems. During these years, Iredale and Lanchaster nurtured the ES 2000 optical scan voting system into existence.

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