Shoup Voting Machine Corporation
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The Shoup Voting Machine Corporation was an American manufacturer of voting machines, founded in New Jersey[1] in 1905 by Samuel R. Shoup.[2] It changed names and locations over the years,[3] before going out of business as Advanced Voting Solutions, Inc. of Frisco, Texas in 2015.[4]
Safemaker Jacob H. Meyers created the Automatic Voting Machine in 1888 and established the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation (AVM) in 1898.[5] Samuel R. Shoup followed his example, built his own lever voting machine and founded the Shoup Voting Machine Corporation in 1905.[2] It "operated on a limited scale", until "the development and sale of the model 2.5 in the mid 1930s turned the corporation into a successful and profitable operation."[6] The two rivals grew to dominate the American market.[7] By 1928, one of six citizens registered their votes on an AVM or Shoup machine.[2] In all, Shoup sold 100,000 lever-operated voting machines, half of which were still working and in use for the 2000 presidential election.[8] In the 1950s, the company was renamed the R. F. Shoup Corporation.[3]
"In 1961, General Battery and Ceramic Corporation of New York incorporated ... Shoup Voting Machine Corporation."[6] The voting machine operations were sold in 1965, and an S corporation was formed.[6] Shoup's first foreign sale was to Trinidad in 1968.[9] Aerospace business Macrodyne-Chatillon Corporation "acquired Shoup Voting Machines in 1969 for an estimated $6,000,000, primarily in stock."[6] As a result of adverse publicity from criminal charges (see next section) and a "$2.3 million federal income tax lien which resulted in the Internal Revenue Service seizing certain assets", "effective March 31, 1972, Macrodyne-Chatillon wrote off its investment in, and deconsolidated, The Shoup Voting Machine Corporation (Shoup), a wholly-owned subsidiary."[6]
Both AVM and Shoup machines used a tabular layout. In the Shoup version, each political party was assigned a column, each office a row; AVM reversed this arrangement.[7] Most Shoup machines came with a booth for privacy that could be "collapsed into a package that was relatively easy to transport and store."[7] Ransom F. Shoup introduced improvements between 1929 and 1975.[7]
Lever voting machines went out of production by 1982,[7] but continued to be employed until much later. Rhode Island used Shoup machines from 1936 into the 1990s.[10] The first voting machines in Louisiana were from Shoup; they were employed for more than 50 years, beginning in the 1940s.[11] It was not until January 2010 that The New York Times reported that New York City was expected to choose a replacement for its mechanical Shoup machines after "about a half century" of use.[12]
The company was renamed Shoup Voting Solutions, Inc. in 1992 and Advanced Voting Solutions, Inc. in 2001.[3]
In 2015, Virginia decertified all 3000 of its Advanced Voting Solutions WINvote machines after widespread publicity about previously disclosed security flaws, including a hardwired Wi-Fi password of "abcde".[13] A wide variety of other flaws were documented in the machines, which used unpatched versions of Windows XP Embedded from 2002 that were vulnerable to a critical buffer overflow attack.[14]