https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Voting_Systems
Sequoia Voting Systems was a California-based company that was one of the largest providers of electronic voting systems in the U.S., having offices in Oakland, Denver and New York City. Some of its major competitors were Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) and Election Systems & Software.
On 8 March 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, founded by three Venezuelan software engineers. In November 2007, following a verdict by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Smartmatic was ordered to sell Sequoia, which it did to its Sequoia managers having U.S. citizenship.
On 4 June 2010, certain assets were acquired by the Canadian company Dominion Voting Systems . At the time it had contracts for 300 jurisdictions in 16 states through its BPS, WinEDS, Edge, Edge2, Advantage, Insight, InsightPlus and 400C systems.[1]
In February 2014, Sequoia filed a bankruptcy petition under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code.[2]
How smart do you need to be to know you do not want a Canadian or Venezuelan company controlling American election results?
Even democrats knew this before the 2020 election.
From https://skagitrepublicans.com/troublingforeigntiesbehindvotingmachinesusedinus :
“After deciding that Indra’s voting machines weren’t “flexible” enough, Chávez contacted Smartmatic, according to the official. Smartmatic says that Chavez didn’t contact the company but that the process went through the National Election Council; Smartmatic later won the bid over Indra, and the five-member Venezuelan electoral council, dominated by Chávez supporters, awarded a $91 million contract to Smartmatic for the referendum.
“At midnight on Election Day, the machine stopped counting,” the official said, noting that Chávez was losing at that point. “By 3 a.m., Chavez had won by 10 percent.”
Smartmatic spokesperson Samira Saba said that results aren’t available in real time.
In 2005, Smartmatic bought Sequoia Voting Systems, a much larger and more established company based in Oakland, California. At the time, Sequoia had installed voting equipment in 17 U.S. states and Washington.
Concerns that Smartmatic had ties to Chávez were so widespread at the time that the U.S. government began investigating the takeover of the company a year after the purchase, The New York Times reported at the time. The probe was conducted by the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews deals by foreign acquirers for potential national security risks.
Among the points for concern was Smartmatic’s convoluted business structure.
“Smartmatic has claimed to be of U.S. origin, but its true owners—probably elite Venezuelans of several political strains—remain hidden behind a web of holding companies in the Netherlands and Barbados,” according to the State Department cable.
In 2006, Treasury Secretary John Snow had inquired whether the Venezuelan government could use Sequoia to manipulate U.S. elections. Then-Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), another high-profile politician who raised similar concerns, was the first to voice the need for an investigation of the Sequoia deal.
Before it sold Sequoia, Smartmatic had refused to undergo such a review by the U.S. government, claiming all the allegations were simply rumors.
“It seems [Smartmatic] could not overcome the cloud of doubt surrounding this deal—had they been able to, we would not be talking about a sale of Sequoia today,” Maloney said in a 2006 statement. “As I said in May, it seems that a CFIUS review was in fact the proper course.”
Smartmatic attempted to respond to those concerns, but in 2007, ended up selling Sequoia to what the company described in a statement as “a group of private U.S. investors comprised by Sequoia’s current executive management team, led by Sequoia President & CEO Jack Blaine and the company’s chief financial officer, Peter McManemy.”
Such private equity firms, as well as Dominion, were named in a scathing 2019 release by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), who had raised concerns about the poor condition and vulnerabilities of voting machines and other election equipment, along with a lack of transparency, in letters to these firms.?