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John Charlton reported three weeks ago that, “… Obama made his first official move to corrupt and undermine the 2010 elections… The move consisted in the little noticed appointment of a technical adviser ,Edwin B. Smith, III, to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC).” Smith is known to have been the vice president of manufacturing, compliance, quality and certification at Sequoia Voting Systems, which is a company that makes voting machines, and it has been at the center of infamous voting irregularities in different elections across the country. Sequoia has secured the voting...

GETS FORMER SEQUOIA CO. VP NAMED AS ADVISER TO U.S. ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION Earlier this month, Obama made his first official move to corrupt and undermine the 2010 elections. The move consisted in the little noticed appointment of a technical adviser to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The importance of the appointment was explained at The Brad Blog last Monday. The Official Press Release of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission read as follows: U.S. ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION 1225 New York Ave. NW – Suite 1100 Washington, DC 20005 For Immediate Release December...

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...

There's an old adage in election-year politics: "Vote early, and vote often." While that second part is usually meant as a little humorous jab, Sequoia Voting Systems apparently wasn't in on the joke. See, in California and other states, some polling places have these e-voting devices (made by Sequoia) known as AVC Edge voting machines, and each machine comes with a yellow button located on the back of each device. The button is designed as a manual backup, which activists claim allows people to vote as many times as they like.

With Diebold admitting its own machines are utterly insecure, competitor Sequoia is now under the microscope and, after a little quality time with the company's machines, Princeton researchers have filed a 158 page report on the ease of replacing their ROMs and winning yourself an election. Okay, we know what you're thinking: "Hacking hardware isn't exactly easy when the computer is in a locked box." Amazingly, it is. A researcher was able to bypass the physical security mechanisms in 13 seconds, despite never having picked a lock before. Now you're thinking: "But you'd need to do that on hundreds of...

Sequoia Voting Systems' problems haven't been limited to Palm Beach County. In Indian River County's primary, election officials didn't realize for two days that more than 10,000 extra votes had been cast, possibly because of an incomplete test of that county's vote transmitting system. In Washington, D.C., an Elections and Ethics Investigation Special Committee report blasted Sequoia for trying to blame election workers for more phantom votes. The report said "the evidence appears to indicate that there was a problem both in equipment [the server] and in the software."

The vendor for Denver Elections failed to print and ship more than 18,000 mail ballots - 7,000 more than originally thought - but the post office says all of them will be delivered to voters by Wednesday. The mistake was discovered over the weekend after a local Postal Service official said Sequoia Voting Systems delivered slightly more than 10,000 ballots on Oct. 16 from its Porterville, Calif., printing plant. It was initally thought that the order was about 11,000 ballots short - a problem that came to light after numerous complaints from voters who said they hadn't received their ballots....

{SNIP} This lawsuit alleges that the voting machines used for years in the majority of New Jersey counties – Sequoia’s AVC Advantages - are inaccurate, insecure, and unreliable – and thus unconstitutional for use in New Jersey. Sequoia categorically denies this allegation and has provided material to the contrary. {SNIP} “Throughout our report response, we show how simple, established, and previously used accuracy and security protections - removed from the Advantages studied in the report published by the plaintiffs - make the items in their report next to impossible,” said Edwin Smith, Vice President of Compliance and Fulfillment for Sequoia...

SEQUOIA NATIONAL FOREST, Calif. - Firefighters were trying to contain a wildfire that had burned about 2,400 acres of grass and brush in Sequoia National Forest and was spreading into wooded areas Monday. Officials asked residents in a recreation area called Horse Meadow to evacuate their cabins and trailers after the Goldledge Fire inched about a mile away from the private property, said Geri Adams, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman. "We're getting some really strong winds and the humidity is low, so the fire is really active," she said. The fire started across the street from the Goldledge Campgrounds on...

• Cave off limits to public as research continues • ‘It will add to our knowledge’What’s described as “a significant new cave” has been discovered within Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in the Central Valley. The discovery was made in August 2006 by four researchers affiliated with the Cave Research Foundation but made public only this week by the National Park Service. The cave has been named Ursa Minor for the Little Dipper constellation. The cave features large passages and rooms – many of which are more than 50 feet wide – and beautiful cave formations, the NPS says....

Television talk show host Maury Povich hasn’t always been a big fan of YouTube Inc. because the online video sharing pioneer frequently displays unauthorized clips from his copyrighted program. But Povich’s feelings softened a few days ago when he found out that he was on a long list of universities, foundations, Silicon Valley executives and, yes, television personalities who will share in the windfall from YouTube’s recent $1.76 billion sale to Internet search leader Google Inc. His windfall: More than $80,000. “It’s like I caught lightning in a jar,” Povich said in a Thursday interview. “I had no idea I...

Sequoia touch-screen is California's most widely used Days before the election, state officials have learned that California's most widely used electronic voting machines feature a button in back that can allow someone to vote multiple times. Several computer scientists said Wednesday that the vulnerability found in all touch-screen machines sold by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems was not especially great because using the yellow button for vote fraud would require reaching far behind the voting machine twice and triggering two beeps. "If the machine beeps loudly and someone has their arms wrapped around the machine, the poll workers are going to...

WASHINGTON – Just 10 days before Americans vote in midterm congressional elections that could result in a historic shift of power, the federal government is investigating whether anti-American Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may control the company that operates electronic voting machines in 17 states. Many questions have been raised about the reliability of the new machines, which leave no paper trails for the purposes of recounts. But now federal officials are investigating whether Smartmatic, owner of Sequoia Voting Systems, is secretly controlled by the Castroite revolutionary leader of Venezuela who denounced President Bush as Satan in his most recent United...

Yesterday was the first election for which I was old enought to cast a ballot. I was the fifth voter of the morning at my rural polling place and proudly voted for Lynn Swann for the GOP nomination for Governor. Thanks to the unfunded mandate of the Help America Vote Act everyone had to get used to the touch screen Sequoia machines. I noticed that these machines have been programmed to make "undervoting" extremely cumbersome. You have to hit "confirm" two time, rather than the normal one time, if you have deliberately decided not to dilute your vote by spreading...

 The greater threat to our nation's security comes not from Dubai and its pro-Western government, but from Venezuela, where software engineers with links to the leftist, anti-American regime of Hugo Chávez are programming electronic voting machines that will soon power U.S. elections.Congress spent two weeks overreacting to news that Dubai Ports World would operate several American ports, including Miami's, but a better target for their hysteria would be the acquisition by Smartmatic International of California-based Sequoia Voting Systems, whose machines serve millions of U.S. voters. That Smartmatic -- which has been accused by Venezuela's opposition of helping Chávez rig elections...

Hugo Chavez wants your vote Looking for something to be alarmed about? Forget Dubai. Try Venezuela’s potential takeover of the U.S. voting apparatus. A secretive, intransparent company called ‘Smartmatic’ that’s known to have ties to the Venezuelan government, has just bought a U.S. voting machine company called Sequoia. And the deal has gotten no scrutiny from federal regulators, who cite outdated criteria for national military security as their only watchpoint. That’s right, Venezuela, a country that holds the dirtiest, filthiest most intransparent and fraudulent elections in the hemisphere, elections that match those of Zimbabwe or Belarus, has just got its...

London 24.03.06 | Somewhat I feel vindicated. In August last year I posted an extremely thorough piece of investigative blogging regarding Smartmatic; the e-voting machines vendor, which owns Sequoia, that has proven so useful to Venezuela's wannabe dictator Hugo Chavez. The recent e-voting fiasco in Chicago comes to prove the hypothesis that one thing is to observe how rigged electoral processes in far away lands, which do not affect Americans, are overlooked, or simply ignored, by the mainstream media and an entirely different matter when similar problems corrode the transparency and outcome of elections in US soil.

SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - A Porterville minister accused of sexual abusing two teenage parishioners fell 400 feet to his death at Moro Rock, a National Park Service official said Monday. The Rev. Santos Teixeira's fall Sunday was under "uncertain circumstances," requiring the Park Service to notify the FBI of its investigation, said Alexandra Picavet, a Sequoia National Park spokeswoman. Picavet said park investigators have yet to determine the manner of death and cautioned it was standard procedure to notify the FBI about the case, which occurred on federal land. Teixeira, 56, fell to his death late Monday afternoon from...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 14 (Reuters) - A federal judge temporarily barred a logging project on Monday that would have included a small section of California's Giant Sequoia National Monument. The plan in question would thin trees across 1,322 acres (535 hectares), of which under a quarter are within the Giant Sequoia National Monument, in an effort to protect a small local community against forest fires, said Matt Mathes, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service in California. The Monument spans 328,000 acres (132,700 hectares) that are home to two-thirds of all sequoia trees in the world. Several environmental groups sued...

After analyzing the minutes of a meeting held in Chicago between Cook County and Chicago's city officials with the board of Sequoia, that remained in charge after the take over, and that of Smartmatic [6], Ochoa noted that unknown Venezuelan investors, operating via proxy European ventures, could indeed be the controlling power behind Smartmatic. Ochoa indicated that an entry in the minutes of the meeting aforementioned describes Cook County's Commissioner Peter Silvestri [14] asking to representatives of Sequoia/Smartmatic "who owns Sequoia?" (sic). The answer came from Honorable David Orr [15]: "Smartmatic International, which is owned by a Dutch company, owns...