Sequoia Voting Systems put out a press release this morning announcing a new corporate ownership structure, involving the sale of the company to a private group of U.S. investors led by the current Sequoia corporate management team:

The investment group, led by Sequoia President & CEO Jack Blaine and company Chief Financial Officer Peter McManemy, purchased Sequoia from former parent company Smartmatic Corporation for an undisclosed sum. As with most transactions involving two private entities, the specific terms of the sale are not being disclosed. However, this transaction does include investment by the management team, a small loan and an earn-out. This scenario provides an excellent financial structure for Sequoia to leverage and completely eliminates Smartmatic’s ownership, control and operational rights of any kind in Sequoia.

The complete press release is available on Sequoia’s website.

At the same time, Sequoia has rolled out a new website, with an intriguing new component: a corporate blogsite, called “Ballot Blog”. Frequent readers of my writings on Election Updates may recall that on April 4, 2007, I wrote a short essay called “The See-Through Voting System Vendor?”, where I pointed to an article in Wired Magazine by Clive Thompson and argued that voting system vendors could do more — including developing corporate blogsites — to be more transparent about their operations. Are they listening?