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When you've got no proof all that is left is ridicule and the majority of people will buy it. This is Murdoch-owned press in Australia. I understand that in the US Fox News have lost a full HALF of their viewership.
What is the truth behind the
links between Venezuelan
firm, Smartmatic and the US
election?
Donald Trump’s legal team held an extraordinary press conference on Thursday to make their case for overturning the election results, claiming it was stolen by “crooks” and infiltrated by “Communist money”.
The President’s legal team, headed by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Former Assistant US Attorney Sidney Powell, along with lawyers Jenna Ellis, Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, outlined various cases the campaign was bringing in key swing states where Mr Trump narrowly lost to Joe Biden.
Mr Giuliani, hair dye dripping down the side of his face at one point, repeated claims of massive absentee ballot fraud, including during the counting in key Democrat-controlled urban centres where Republican poll watchers say they were illegally prevented from observing the process.
Donald Trump’s legal team held an extraordinary press conference on Thursday to make their case for overturning the election results, claiming it was stolen by “crooks” and infiltrated by “Communist money”.
The President’s legal team, headed by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Former Assistant US Attorney Sidney Powell, along with lawyers Jenna Ellis, Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, outlined various cases the campaign was bringing in key swing states where Mr Trump narrowly lost to Joe Biden.
Mr Giuliani, hair dye dripping down the side of his face at one point, repeated claims of massive absentee ballot fraud, including during the counting in key Democrat-controlled urban centres where Republican poll watchers say they were illegally prevented from observing the process.
Here are the fact checkers, putting up straw men and shooting those down.
Is Dominion Voting Systems software developed by engineers from Venezuela and were votes sent to servers in Spain? No, that's not true. Government and independent election technology experts confirm what Dominion's spokesperson says: Dominion, founded by Canadians, is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Votes are not stored on servers in Spain, since computer election systems avoid any connection to the internet in order to reduce vulnerability to hackers.
Here are some historical histories that clearly demonstrate the links between Smartmatic and Venezuela. The media are now denying their own stories. Will they expunge them from the internet?
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.
https://archive.is/q8HGY#selection-373.0-569.165
WASHINGTON -- Voting-machine company Smartmatic Corp. said it would sell its U.S. subsidiary to end a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. into whether Smartmatic is partially owned by the Venezuelan government.
Smartmatic, owned by Venezuelan entrepreneurs who split their time between Caracas and Boca Raton, Fla., portrayed itself as the latest victim of a U.S. protectionist response to foreign investment in sensitive industries. Earlier this year, a company owned by the government of Dubai, a Gulf emirate that is part of the United Arab Emirates, drew opposition in Congress and some media outlets with plans to buy a company that runs commercial operations at several U.S. ports. The company later sold the port-operations business.
"Given the current climate of the United States marketplace, with so much public debate over foreign ownership of firms in an area that is viewed as critical U.S. infrastructure -- election technology -- we feel it is in both companies' best interests to move forward as separate entities with separate ownership," Smartmatic said. The company said it plans to sell Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., headquartered in Oakland, Calif., which it purchased in early 2005 for $16 million.
The Committee on Foreign Investment, known as the CFIUS, reviews foreign acquisitions to see if they pose national-security concerns. Normally, such reviews are conducted before deals close. The Smartmatic acquisition drew attention earlier this year because of concerns that the government run by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, an opponent of U.S. policy, owns a stake in the company.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116674617078557263
3 August, 2017
Venezuela’s president has accused the company that provides the technological platform for the country’s voting system of bowing to US pressure after it said the official turnout figure in Sunday’s vote had been manipulated by at least a million votes.
Nicolás Maduro stood by the official count of more than 8m votes and said an additional 2 million people would have voted if they had not been blocked by opposition protesters. “That stupid guy, the president of Smartmatic, pressured to the neck by the gringos and the Brits, said there were 7.5 million [voters],” Maduro said in televised remarks. “I think there were 10 million Venezuelans who went out.”
Antonio Mugica, the chief executive of London-based Smartmatic, had said on Wednesday that results recorded by the company’s systems show “without any doubt” that the official turnout figure was tampered with.
Maduro provided no evidence to support his claim, but his remarks were received with resounding applause from a meeting of about 500 people elected to the assembly on Sunday.
The body, made up entirely of the ruling Socialist party and its political allies, will have the ability to dissolve state institutions and rewrite the constitution. Maduro has also vowed he will use it to target his opponents.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-vote-smartmatic-idUSKBN1AI1KZ
How is this possible? It seems unusual. The company Smartmatic, which for a decade counted the votes of the electoral processes in Venezuela under the Socialist regime, now operates in the U.S. elections.
Yes, its digital democracy business scored a contract in the most populated county in recent elections: Los Angeles.
In this jurisdiction with 5.2 million registered voters and 5,000 polling places, Smartmatic claims to have installed 31,100 voting machines, representing the largest electoral acquisition in North America.
And there’s more. The company also marketed the integration, engineering, and manufacturing of the new voting system.
The decision was made by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to develop its “Voting for All Solution” (VSAP).
However, this company, which boasts on its website that it is an approved supplier to the United States Department of Defense and a founding member of the Electoral Infrastructure Subsector of the Department of Homeland Security, is made up of Chavista tentacles.
Very Red Roots
Antonio Mugica is the Venezuelan engineer at the head of Smartmatic. Along with Róger Piñate, he founded the company that was registered in Boca Raton, Florida, at the same address as a cooperative of Petroleos de Venezuela called Petrolusa.
They organized 15 elections during the mandate of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. The following video reveals important details about this company:
An article in The New York Times reviewed by the BBC highlights a $200,000 loan to the company by the regime as a guarantee for 28% of the shares.
The loan was disbursed seven months before the contract for the 2004 recall referendum was obtained and then justified as an aid to small businesses.
However, according to NYT, Smartmatic won 120 million USD, with the first three elections organized.
“(Smartmatic) went from being a small technology startup to a major player in the market,” reads a U.S. embassy cable leaked by WikiLeaks and reviewed by the BBC.
It also states that although the company claims to be of American origin, “its true owners remain hidden behind a web of holding companies in the Netherlands and Barbados.”
Responsible for the presidential count
Dominion is the name of the company involved in the recent U.S. elections.
Its name is associated with irregularities due to the failure of its electronic systems, whose technology was purchased from Smartmatic through its subsidiary Sequoia, revealed American Thinker.
Dominion denies its link, although, at one point, it allowed Smartmatic to market its same technology abroad in places where Dominion did not do business.
The Washington Examiner notes that “The voting systems provider has contracts in all of the key swing states in which Trump’s campaign team is mounting legal challenges, and Republicans in two of those Southwestern states, Arizona and Nevada, also have their eye on the system.”
Susan Greenhalgh, a Free Speech for People election security expert, cited by the BBC, believes that with the digitalization of the vote, there is potential for elections to be undetectably hacked.
New York University professor Beatrice Atobatele stresses that “if voters do not trust that their votes will be counted, they will no longer participate in the electoral process.”
Business expands
Since 2006, Smartmatic has marketed its services in the United States. By 2015, it boasted of maintaining and configuring 58,000 counting and voting machines that had been sold to 307 jurisdictions.
The machines include about 10,000 optical scanners for digital capture of physical ballots and about 47,000 voting machines.
The states that use this platform include Arizona, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
It handles this market with exclusivity, designing, and manufacturing Edge2Plus- the 17-inch touch screen allows for the capture of voter intent.
It is used in Chicago and Cook County. They made their debut in the 2012 general election and the 2014 midterm election. Even former President Barack Obama exercised his right to vote with these machines.
Additionally, it developed and manufactured the Activator-Accumulator-Transmitter (HAAT) device to consolidate data from different voting machines, print reports, and transmit counts to aggregation centers.
These are not insignificant functions for a company that moved to London and has 600 employees in 16 offices around the world.
Smartmatic is a Venezuelan company that offers electronic voting services in The United States, Barbados, Brazil, Africa, Belgium, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Panamá, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, The Philippines and Taiwan. They work with different technology solutions such as identity management, smart city solutions, and electronic voting systems. They have been managing elections in Venezuela since 2004 and have been rapidly growing since then.
In 2004, they applied to be in charge of the presidential referendum that was going to be held that year. Elections Systems & Software, an American Company, and Indra, a Spanish company, had also applied and despite having much more expertise and experience in the matter of national voting systems, Smartmatic won the opportunity to carry out the 2004 elections in Venezuela.
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