The following are excerpts from interviews with executives from MicroVote. MicroVote was born in 1982.
Morgan County, Indiana, Verified Voting Information.
This is an interview with Microvote.
An I-Team 8 Investigation
Excerpts from Interviews with MicroVote Executives
The following are excerpts from interviews with executives from MicroVote.
James F. Ries (Sr.) was a sales representative for the Automatic Voting Machine Co. out of Jamestown, N.Y., premier manufacturer of lever machines like those used in Marion County till recently. AVM went out of business just as they had developed an electronic voting machine.
Ries took his idea for “a better mousetrap” to Bill Carson of Carson Manufacturing, located in Marion County near the Glendale post office. MicroVote was born in 1982. The company’s headquarters is in Broadripple.
The senior Ries is chief executive officer of the company. His son, James M. Ries (Jr.), is President of MicroVote. Steve Shamo is a sales and customer service representative for Indiana. You can check out MicroVote’s Web site at http://www.MicroVote.com.
For a map of Indiana counties that use MicroVote equipment, click here.
SCRUTINY
I-Team: Who were your first customers?
James F. Ries (Sr.): Most of the lever machine counties that I’d sold lever machines to were interested in MicroVote. It was a better mousetrap.
I-Team: But these days voting systems like your push-button direct record electronic (DRE) machines are under intense scrutiny, especially when it comes to security.
James M. Ries (Jr.): Security is becoming a very, very sensitive topic from both manufacturing and developing of source code to local jurisdiction security. I think this year you’ll see that our entire industry is going to be under the microscope.
I-Team: Especially when you have just a handful of companies on the receiving end of lots of money…
Ries Jr.: It’s been a very small industry, mostly private companies operating the majority of the elections. With the advent of the Help America Vote Act and the several-billion-dollar subsidy that has been appropriated for our industry, you can see why these folks are starting to take this industry much more seriously than they did prior to 2000. Looking back four years ago, what have we done as an industry to increase the faith of the voter and instill the fact that every vote counts?
I-Team: The company most under the microscope has been Ohio-based Diebold. Does MicroVote welcome such scrutiny?
Ries Jr.: Diebold is the 800-pound gorilla. The benefit that came out of the Diebold study was increased scrutiny within the vending community: How do companies control internal source code, how do we release our firmware upgrades, how do we operate as a business? What has that done for the end user? Not a whole lot.
Read more here: Interview with Microvote
