Adrienne Brandon, chief financial officer for TruVote, says only weeks ago Gibbs asked her: “‘If something happened to me, would you carry this on?’”
She says, “Even with him gone, we will.”
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... Proponents of a paper trail were emboldened when Athan Gibbs, President and CEO of TruVote International, demonstrated a voting machine at a vendor’s fair in Columbus that provides two separate voting receipts.
The first paper receipt displays the voter’s touch screen selection under plexiglass that falls into a lockbox after the voter approves. Also, the TruVote system provides the voter with a receipt that includes a unique voter ID and pin number which can be used to call in to a voter audit internet connection to make sure the vote cast was actually counted.
Brooks Thomas, Coordinator of Elections in Tennessee, stated, “I’ve not seen anything that compares to the Gibbs’ TruVote validation system. . . .” The Assistant Secretary of State of Georgia, Terrel L. Slayton, Jr., claimed Gibbs had come up with the “perfect solution.”
... Athan Gibbs wonders, “Why would you buy a voting machine from a company like Diebold which provides a paper trail for every single machine it makes except its voting machines? And then, when you ask it to verify its numbers, it hides behind ‘trade secrets.’”
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Designer of verified vote system dies in unlucky accident |
by Holly Edwards, The Tennessean [Nashville, TN]
March 14, 2004
After more than 1 million votes went uncounted in the last presidential election, Athan Gibbs Sr. devoted his life to making sure voters in future elections would know their votes mattered.
The enterprising 57-year-old saw his invention of the TruVote vote-casting system as nothing less than the key to social justice and democracy in America.
As family members and business partners gathered at the TruVote office yesterday morning to mourn Mr. Gibbs' death, they vowed that his dream would not die with him.
Mr. Gibbs was killed about 10:30 a.m. Friday in a car crash on Interstate 65 near Eighth Avenue North as he drove from his north Nashville home to his downtown office at Tennessee State University's Business Incubation Center.
Metro police said Mr. Gibbs lost control of his Chevy Blazer after he cut in front of an 18-wheeler and the two vehicles collided. The Blazer rolled several times in the southbound lanes, went over the retaining wall and came to rest on its roof on the northbound side. Gibbs was ejected, police said.
Before his sudden death, friends and family said, Mr. Gibbs worked tirelessly on the TruVote system and, with backing from Microsoft Inc., was marketing his invention nationwide.
"He loved God, he loved people and he loved democracy, and we're going to keep his dream going," said Mr. Gibbs' 25-year-old son, Jonathan, who worked with his father on the project. "It's more important than ever now to make sure his vision becomes a reality."
Mr. Gibbs spent about three years and roughly $2 million -- including thousands of dollars from his own bank account -- to develop and market the electronic vote-casting system. TruVote allows voters to touch their candidates' names on a computer screen and receive receipts of their vote at the end of the process. They can then go to a Web site, punch in their voter validation number and make sure their vote was recorded.
U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat who represents Davidson, the eastern half of Cheatham and the western half of Wilson County in Congress, said the TruVote system was "one of the most promising technologies in the world for fixing democracies."
With a federal mandate for states to review and upgrade their vote casting systems by 2006, Mr. Gibbs' invention was getting increasing attention nationwide, Cooper said.
"Every once in awhile, we see a fundamental need in this country and someone comes up with a fundamental discovery to fill that need, and that's what Athan had," Cooper said. "This is a tragic loss for the entire country."
Mr. Gibbs was driven by his experiences growing up in Memphis in the 1950s and '60s, when minorities were struggling to exercise their right to vote. After a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights study of the 2000 presidential election showed that votes cast by African-Americans in Florida, a decisive state, were 10 times more likely to be rejected, Mr. Gibbs knew he had to take action.
His quests for democracy and social equality also were driven by his religious faith, and he served as an associate minister at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Nashville.
"As an African-American clergyman, Athan was consumed by a desire for justice, equality and freedom for all people," said the Rev. Enoch Fuzz, pastor of Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church. "And, he just ran out full speed ahead and tried to accomplish that."
Mr. Gibbs was an accountant and financial auditor for 30 years and started his own company, INCO Tax Service of Tennessee. He received a bachelor of business administration degree from Tennessee State University and a bachelor of theology degree from American Baptist College.
In the 1970s, former U.S. Rep. Bob Clement hired Mr. Gibbs as a financial analyst when Clement headed the Tennessee Public Service Commission. The two remained close friends over the past three decades, and Clement had been serving as a business consultant for TruVote.
Clement said Mr. Gibbs' energy and idealism were infectious, and he called Mr. Gibbs "one of the finest people I've met in my life."
"We in the U.S. have one of the worst voting records in the world, and Athan was out to fix that," he said. "A lot of people have ideas but never carry them out. Athan was following through on his dream, and his energy level was phenomenal. I don't think he ever slept."
In addition to his son, Mr. Gibbs is survived by his wife, Dorothy, and a daughter, Angela.
Funeral arrangements are pending and will be handled by Lewis and Wright Funeral Home in Nashville.
Published by
The Tennessean [Nashville, TN]
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| Related news, from our archives: |
Inventor of 'verified vote' machine killed in crash
by Hazel Trice Edney, The Wilmington [DE] Journal
The African-American who invented a voting machine that he believed would remedy the problems that occurred during the 2000 presidential election has died only eight months before the next contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry.
Athan Gibbs Sr. of Nashville, who unveiled his invention of a computerized voting machine with paper receipts at the summer conference of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) in Atlanta three years ago, was killed when the SUV he was driving was hit from behind by a tractor trailer as he changed lanes in the morning of March 12. He was 57 years old.
Determined to win full federal certification for the TruVote System, Gibbs, an accountant, never saw his dream come true. However, his family and associates say they will pick up where he left off.
"It's going to go into full throttle," says his son, Jonathan Gibbs, executive director of a marketing firm and graduate of the University of Memphis. "I'll be one of the ball carriers."
Jonathan, 25, recalls his father being so disheartened by the developments during the loss of more than 200,000 votes in Florida and an estimated 4 to 6 million votes nationwide during in 2000 that he repeatedly sent him to Wal-Mart for at least 20 video cassette tapes to record the daily television coverage until the U. S. Supreme Court stopped the recounting of votes in Florida.
Ultimately, Jonathan Gibbs recalls, "He just figured out the way to fix this thing is to have an audit system. Whenever there's a problem with finance or numbers, you need some kind of accounting system."
In short, TruVote allows voters to touch the names of their candidates on a computer screen and receive paper receipts with an exclusive validation number. Then, as a backup, they could go to a Web site, punch in the validation number, and receive confirmation that their vote was recorded.
Over three years, Gibbs established the company, TruVote International, and spent about $2 million, including thousands of his own dollars, to develop and market the TruVote system.
Over the past year, Microsoft had become a marketing partner when TruVote began utilizing its software.
"My father worked so extremely hard with this project," Jonathan says. "Me and my brother and my family have always been alongside him. It's like the construction worker, somebody's handing him the hammer, somebody's handing him the nail, you know, while he worked on it."
An entrepreneur with 29 years of accounting and audit experience, including positions with the state of Tennessee, his own tax firm, and a consultant to the U. S. Department of Commerce' Minority Business Development Center in Nashville, Gibbs was tenacious.
That was evident in a telephone message that Gibbs left for this reporter March 11 around 3 P.M., less than 24 hours before his death.
"This paper audit trail that we pioneered almost two-and-a-half or three years ago, it is really in the forefront of the news right now," he said in the tape-recorded message. "Many states are looking at requiring a paper audit trail. When you get this message, please give me a call so that I can follow up with you and possibly get you to do a story on the need for the paper audit trail. The voter verifiable paper audit trail is the only system that can be used that will assure that all votes have been received, recorded and counted in the manner intended."
Within 10 minutes, he'd called back, this time speaking directly with this reporter, excited that his idea was increasingly catching on, promising to send the latest package on TruVote for a follow-up story. He was also making plans for a conference call with NNPA News Service Editor-in-Chief George E. Curry and NNPA columnist Jim Clingman to discuss further coverage.
"He said, ‘Jim, this thing is about to break,'" Clingman recalls Gibbs saying on the eve of his death. "He says, ‘We're right at breakthrough now, but we need some national publicity on this system.' So, he wanted to go through NNPA to get it done."
Gibbs' daughter, Angela, 21, says her father's consciousness about voting went back much further than the 2000 election.
"One evening last summer when I came home from work, he showed me this book and there was a picture of African-Americans and they were being beaten and he was just telling me the story of the Civil Rights Movement and how they were trying to get the right to vote and trying to get different rights and he says that's what inspired him," says his daughter, a marketing major at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. "And that's why he does what he does, because a lot of people fought to get the right to vote. And then it really upset him that even though they did get the right to vote, that their votes were more likely not to count."
Dorothy Gibbs, the widowed elementary school teacher, was not yet ready to discuss her husband's death. Their daughter, Angela, says, "He had a never give up attitude. He was really persistent. He never believed in giving up. He wouldn't let us quit anything."
Gibbs' business associates remember him in the same way.
"I can honestly say that I have never in my life worked with a person on a project who was more dedicated," says Michael A. Grant, Gibbs' vice president for marketing. "He was a visionary. He had a fantastic idea. It was the right idea for the right time. It was a genuine concern for fixing what was broken with our democracy. And I give him credit because the whole country is now talking about an audit trail."
Adrienne Brandon, chief financial officer for TruVote, says only weeks ago Gibbs asked her: "‘If something happened to me, would you carry this on?'" She says, "Even with him gone, we will."
Published by
The Wilmington [DE] Journal
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