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Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine

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This just in...

Reports from Whitfield County, GA that Dominion machines are flipping votes.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1847361255415460148




The Starmaker wrote:
> 
> U.S. Investigates Voting Machines’ Venezuela Ties
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/washington/29ballot.html
> 
> The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a
> leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small
> software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan
> government of President Hugo Chávez.
> 
> The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software
> company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether
> the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s
> operations, government officials and others familiar with the
> investigation said.
> 
> The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by
> the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the
> same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt
> by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports
> earlier this year.
> 
> The committee’s formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary,
> Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday
> in The Miami Herald.
> 
> Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly
> denied yesterday that President Chávez’s administration, which has been
> bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.
> 
> “The government of Venezuela doesn’t have anything to do with the
> company aside from contracting it for our electoral process,” the
> Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.
> 
> Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting
> technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace
> the country’s elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that
> confirmed Mr. Chávez as president in August 2004.
> 
> Seven months before that voting contract was awarded, a Venezuelan
> government financing agency invested more than $200,000 into a smaller
> technology company, owned by some of the same people as Smartmatic, that
> joined with Smartmatic as a minor partner in the bid.
> 
> In return, the government agency was given a 28 percent stake in the
> smaller company and a seat on its board, which was occupied by a senior
> government official who had previously advised Mr. Chávez on elections
> technology. But Venezuelan officials later insisted that the money was
> merely a small-business loan and that it was repaid before the
> referendum.
> 
> With a windfall of some $120 million from its first three contracts with
> Venezuela, Smartmatic then bought the much larger and more established
> Sequoia Voting Systems, which now has voting equipment installed in 17
> states and the District of Columbia.
> 
> Since its takeover by Smartmatic in March 2005, Sequoia has worked
> aggressively to market its voting machines in Latin America and other
> developing countries. “The goal is to create the world’s leader in
> electronic voting solutions,” said Mitch Stoller, a company spokesman.
> 
> But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic
> has become less visible in public documents as the company has been
> restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign
> trusts.
> 
> “The government should know who owns our voting machines; that is a
> national security concern,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney,
> Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review
> the Sequoia takeover.
> 
> “There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of
> the company,” Ms. Maloney said of Smartmatic in a telephone interview
> yesterday. “The Cfius process, if it is moving forward, can determine
> that.”
> 
> The concern over Smartmatic’s purchase of Sequoia comes amid rising
> unease about the security of touch-screen voting machines and other
> electronic elections systems.
> 
> Government officials familiar with the Smartmatic inquiry said they
> doubted that even if the Chávez government was some kind of secret
> partner in the company, it would try to influence elections in the
> United States. But some of them speculated that the purchase of Sequoia
> could help Smartmatic sell its products in Latin America and other
> developing countries, where safeguards against fraud are weaker.
> 
> A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which oversees the foreign
> investment committee, said she could not comment on whether the panel
> was conducting a formal investigation.
> 
> “Cfius has been in contact with the company,” said the spokeswoman,
> Brookly McLaughlin, citing discussions that were first disclosed in
> July. “It is important that the process is conducted in a professional
> and nonpolitical manner.”
> 
> The committee has wide authority to review foreign investments in the
> United States that might have national security implications. In
> practice, though, it has focused mainly on foreign acquisitions of
> defense companies and other investments in traditional security realms.
> 
> Since the political furor over the Dubai ports deal, members of Congress
> from both parties have sought to widen the purview of such reviews to
> incorporate other emerging national security concerns.
> 
> In late July, the House and the Senate overwhelmingly approved
> legislation to expand the committee’s scope, give a greater role to the
> office of the director of national intelligence and strengthen
> Congressional oversight of the review process.
> 
> But the Bush administration opposed major changes, and Congressional
> leaders did not act to reconcile the two bills before Congress
> adjourned.
> 
> Foreigners seeking to buy American companies in areas like defense
> manufacturing typically seek the committee’s review themselves before
> going ahead with a purchase. Legal experts said it would be highly
> unusual for the panel to investigate a transaction like the Sequoia
> takeover, and even more unusual for the panel to try to nullify the
> transaction so long after it was completed.
> 
> It is unclear, moreover, what the government would need to uncover about
> the Sequoia sale to take such an action.
> 
> The investment committee’s review typically involves an initial 30-day
> examination of any transactions that might pose a threat to national
> security, including a collective assessment from the intelligence
> community. Should concerns remain, one of the agencies involved can
> request an additional and more rigorous 45-day investigation.
> 
> In the case of the ports deal, the transaction was approved by the
> investment committee. But the Dubai company later abandoned the deal,
> agreeing to sell out to an American company after a barrage of criticism
> by legislators from both parties who said the administration had not
> adequately reviewed the deal or informed Congress about its
> implications.
> 
> The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and
> the Chávez government have been well known to United States
> foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which
> Mr. Chávez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an
> official margin of nearly 20 percent.
> 
> Opposition leaders asserted that the balloting had been rigged. But a
> statistical analysis of the distribution of the vote by American experts
> in electronic voting security showed that the result did not fit the
> pattern of irregularities that the opposition had claimed.
> 
> At the same time, the official audit of the vote by the Venezuelan
> election authorities was badly flawed, one of the American experts said.
> “They did it all wrong,” one of the authors of the study, Avi Rubin, a
> professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said in an
> interview.
> 
> Opposition members of Venezuela’s electoral council had also protested
> that they were excluded from the bidding process in which Smartmatic and
> a smaller company, the Bizta Corporation, were selected to replace a
> $120 million system that had been built by Election Systems and Software
> of Omaha.
> 
> Smartmatic was then a fledgling technology start-up. Its registered
> address was the Boca Raton, Fla., home of the father of one of the two
> young Venezuelan engineers who were its principal officers, Antonio
> Mugica and Alfredo Anzola, and it had a one-room office with a single
> secretary.
> 
> The company claimed to have only two going ventures, small contracts for
> secure communications software that a Smartmatic spokesman said had a
> total value of about $2 million.
> 
> At that point, Bizta amounted to even less. Company documents, first
> reported in 2004 by The Herald, showed the firm to be virtually dormant
> until it received the $200,000 investment from a fund controlled by the
> Venezuelan Finance Ministry, which took a 28 percent stake in return.
> 
> Weeks before Bizta and Smartmatic won the referendum contract, the
> government also placed a senior official of the Science Ministry, Omar
> Montilla, on Bizta’s board, alongside Mr. Mugica and Mr. Anzola. Mr.
> Montilla, The Herald reported, had acted as an adviser to Mr. Chávez on
> elections technology.
> 
> More recent corporate documents show that before and after Smartmatic’s
> purchase of Sequoia from a British-owned firm, the company was
> reorganized in an array of holding companies based in Delaware
> (Smartmatic International), the Netherlands (Smartmatic International
> Holding, B.V.), and Curaçao (Smartmatic International Group, N.V.). The
> firm’s ownership was further shielded in two Curaçao trusts.
> 
> Mr. Stoller, the Smartmatic spokesman, said that the reorganization was
> done simply to help expand the company’s international operations, and
> that it had not tried to hide its ownership, which he said was more than
> 75 percent in the hands of Mr. Mugica and his family.
> 
> “No foreign government or entity, including Venezuela, has ever held any
> stake in Smartmatic,” Mr. Stoller said. “Smartmatic has always been a
> privately held company, and despite that, we’ve been fully transparent
> about the ownership of the corporation.”
> 
> Mr. Stoller emphasized that Bizta was a separate company and said the
> shares the Venezuelan government received in it were “the guarantee for
> a loan.”
> 
> Mr. Stoller also described concerns about the security of Sequoia’s
> electronic systems as unfounded, given their certification by federal
> and state election agencies.
> 
> But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia
> voting machines were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities.
> Smartmatic’s new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public
> hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help
> with the vote.
> 
> Some problems with the election were later blamed on a software
> component, which transmits the voting results to a central computer,
> that was developed in Venezuela.
> 
> --
> The Starmaker -- To question the unquestionable, ask the unaskable,
> to think the unthinkable, mention the unmentionable, say the unsayable,
> and challenge the unchallengeable.




-- 
The Starmaker -- To question the unquestionable, ask the unaskable,
to think the unthinkable, mention the unmentionable, say the unsayable, 
and challenge the unchallengeable.

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How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-11 11:54 -0700
  Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-11 12:39 -0700
    Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-11 13:15 -0700
      Too Big To Rig???? The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-12 12:11 -0700
        Re: Too Big To Rig???? The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-14 16:23 -0700
          Re: Too Big To Rig???? The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-15 10:17 -0700
            Re: Too Big To Rig???? The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-15 10:34 -0700
              Re: Too Big To Rig???? The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-17 18:13 -0700
                Re: Too Big To Rig???? % <pursent100@gmail.com> - 2024-10-17 19:53 -0700
                Re: Too Big To Rig???? The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-17 21:43 -0700
                Re: Too Big To Rig???? The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-19 10:06 -0700
                Re: Too Big To Rig???? Gronk <invalide@invalid.invalid> - 2024-10-19 23:43 -0600
  Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-11 15:21 -0700
    Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-11 22:21 -0700
      Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-11 22:43 -0700
        Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-12 12:45 -0700
          Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine Thomas Heger <ttt_heg@web.de> - 2024-10-13 09:08 +0200
            Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-13 13:53 -0700
            Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine Governor Swill <governor.swill@gmail.com> - 2024-10-14 12:35 -0400
              Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine Thomas Heger <ttt_heg@web.de> - 2024-10-16 07:38 +0200
                Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine Governor Swill <governor.swill@gmail.com> - 2024-10-16 19:09 -0400
        Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-13 14:19 -0700
          Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> - 2024-10-19 10:02 -0700
            Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine Gronk <invalide@invalid.invalid> - 2024-10-19 23:48 -0600
  Re: How To Rig a Dominion Voting Machine x <x@x.org> - 2024-10-15 02:26 -0700

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