Posted on 10/28/2006 7:04:53 PM PDT by floridareader1
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 government of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
The federal 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.
But 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 also 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Great post!
Unfortunately, those who are programming our vote machines have no clue as to the English language, or to coherent sentence structure kind'a give me the willeys!
Holy shiiite.
I survived last night, Yank, and now read this!!!!!
As if I didn't have enough to be worked up about.
This is NOT GOOD. And wouldn't surprise me at all.
Cahtah and Co. are happy though!
Rough morning?
Solution: just require voting machines to run Open Source software and publish all the code.
Naw, shhh, course not. Where d'ya get such a notion?
I'm dancing in the mustard grass, feeling groovy.
I may be wrong but the post by seastay looks like a computer translation... (babelfish?)..
LOL!
That's their MO: Accuse you opponent, falsely, of doing exactly what YOU are doing.
The little Citgo sticker on them gave it away.
I just got off the phone with Caracas Venezuela. Chavez has ordered that Democrats take back the House and Senate this year!
Oh yeah! You can bet on it! /s
You don't suppose Hugo would support Democrats do you?
I'm glad someone got that. ;o)
Hah!
Great last minute ad:
UBL, Kim Jong Il, Amedinijahd, Chavez, are all voting democrate this Nov. 7th.
Shouldn't you?
The voter would never know he'd just been screwed.
Sequoia Voting Systems is a company based in California. Sequoia is one of the largest providers of electronic voting systems in the US. Some of its main competitors are Diebold Election Systems and Election Systems & Software. Sequoia Voting Systems introduced the Voter Verified Paper Trail (VVPAT) in the US. The VVPAT is a printed copy of an electronic vote, that can be verified by the voter and is saved for audits and/or recounts. It is also known as the Mercuri Method (see Rebecca Mercuri). The VVPAT is considered by many experts to be the simplest and most powerful audit/security mechanism for electronic voting. Today it has become a mandatory requirement in most US jurisdictions. Sequoia has been involved with voting systems for more than 100 years, having invented, at the end of the 19th century, the voting lever machines that are still used today in some US jurisdictions.Smartmatic International is the parent company of Sequoia Voting Systems. Smartmatic International was founded during the late 1990s by two Venezuelan engineers, Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola. Smartmatic designs device-networking technologies, from which different vertical solutions have sprung. One of them is an extremely advanced voting system. Smartmatic claims to have the only fully secure and fully auditable voting technology in the world today. Some controversy has been brought onto them as their technology was used in a recall referendum for president Chavez in 2004. Chavez won by a healthy margin and the opposition cried fraud.
Check the links in #36.
I think we can trust Hugo Chavez to run our elections, don't you?
After all, the elections they ran in Venezuela and Cuba have been models of fairness. Castro usually get 98 per cent of the vote, and Chavez always wins by a healthy margin.
If I am reading correctly it seems that the New York Times is saying that Smarmatic was taken over by Sequoia which is not true.
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