It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
March 20, 2008 2:42 PM PDT
Sequoia Voting Systems site hacked
Part of the Sequoia Voting Systems Web site was defaced and subsequently taken down on Thursday, according to a report in InfoWorld. As CNET prepared this blog, the entire Sequoia Voting System site was frequently inaccessible.
The defacement and subsequent takedown occurred Thursday morning on the company's Ballot Blog page. Sequoia is one of a handful of electronic voting companies used in the United States. It has in recent days come under fire for apparent discrepancies in voter tallies in last month's New Jersey primary election.
cnetnews.cnet.com...
Dear Professors Felten and Appel:
As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.
Very truly yours,
Edwin Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems
(same source)
CEO and President of Sequoia and SVS Holdings, Inc., Jack Blaine's admission, to company employees on a conference call, that SVS/Sequoia, in fact, does not control the Intellectual Property of Sequoia voting systems voting machines, but Smartmatic does.
The arrangement seems to be in violations of an agreement with the U.S. Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) who had been reviewing Venezuela's ties to Smartmatic/Sequoia until Smartmatic agreed to divest of the company, in a deal which purportedly sold off all control of Sequoia to SVS, Holdings, Inc.
wiki
Smartmatic is organized around three business areas: Electronic voting systems, integrated security systems , and systems for people registration and authentication for government applications.
Smartmatic has offices in the US, Mexico, Venezuela, Barbados, Spain, Philippines and Taiwan.
wiki
Drug Pilot, Drug Pilot, Election Exec Killed on CIA Plane
WORLD EXCLUSIVE
May 7, 2008
by Daniel Hopsicker
One week after the crash outside Caracas, Venezuela of a twin-engine Piper Navajo (N6463L), an air of intrigue surrounds almost everything about the flight, including the plane's ownership, passengers, and pilot.
Woven into one small story about a plane crash in Venezuela that killed seven people are visible threads from two perennial American cover-ups: one surrounding vote fraud, and one covering-up the CIA's role in drug trafficking.
For anyone interested in the news that gets left out of the newspaper, its’ a Perfect Storm. The Mother of All Scandals.
The downed plane's relevance to the ongoing story of vote fraud in America involves the identity of it's passenger, Jose Alfredo Anzola, a 34-year old founder of Smartmatic, a Venezuela-based election company whose American subsidiary counted one in every three votes in the 2004 Presidential election, while engaged the whole time in heated controversy over allegations the firm counting America's votes had hidden ties to—of all people— Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.
The connection between last week's plane crash and the ongoing saga of CIA Drug trafficking begins with 43-year old Mario Donadi Gafaro, the veteran drug pilot at the controls of the twin engine plane.
Donadi boasts a 1999 drug trafficking conviction in the U.S., where he served three years.
Then, even more recently, he was convicted of the same offense in Venezuela, and sentenced to an eight-year stretch at Venezuela’s Big House.
When he crashed and burned last week, reporters noted with surprise, he still had six years to serve. Donadi was supposed to be in prison.
But he apparently has friends in high places.
source
Since 2000, Mr. Yaňes worked at CANTV, which, during his tenure was a Verizon subsidiary and Venezuela’s largest telecommunications corporation. At CANTV, Mr. Yaňes served in leadership positions first as Senior Vice President (SVP) and then as Chief Financial Officer.
Originally posted by semperfortis
reply to post by schrodingers dog
While a conspiracy by it's very nature can be insidious and far reaching, I would need more proof...
Semper
Originally posted by semperfortis
reply to post by schrodingers dog
While a conspiracy by it's very nature can be insidious and far reaching, I would need more proof...
Rep. Maloney
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 in his favor -- now controls a major U.S. e-voting firm should give pause to anybody who thinks that replacing our antiquated butterfly ballots and hanging chads will restore Americans' faith in our electoral process.
Court documents unearthed for Friedman's report reveal that Smartmatic retains control over several aspects of Sequoia, including holding a $2 million note used by the management team (SVS Holdings, Inc.) said to have purchased the company from Smartmatic; Intellectual Property rights for all of Sequoia's currently deployed voting systems in the United States, and; the right to negotatiate overseas non-compete agreements.
CEO and President of Sequoia and SVS Holdings, Inc., Jack Blaine's admission, to company employees on a conference call, that SVS/Sequoia, in fact, does not control the Intellectual Property of Sequoia voting systems voting machines, but Smartmatic does.
The arrangement seems to be in violations of an agreement with the U.S. Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) who had been reviewing Venezuela's ties to Smartmatic/Sequoia until Smartmatic agreed to divest of the company, in a deal which purportedly sold off all control of Sequoia to SVS, Holdings, Inc.
“I am relieved by the news of this sale – it was a long time coming,” said Maloney. “The integrity of our voting machines and elections is vital to national security. Given all of the past uncertainty and anxiety surrounding electronic voting, it’s nice that voters will have this added reassurance when they enter the voting booth this Election Day.”
Smartmatic was the subject of controversy in 2004 when the Hugo Chavez-led Venezuelan government selected it to provide the voting machines system for the presidential recall election, even though it would have been the company’s first time providing machines for an election. Smartmatic teamed up with a Venezuelan software company, Bitza, which at the time was 28 percent owned by Chavez’s government. In 2005, a Chicago city alderman questioned the possible ties between Sequoia and the Venezuelan government when that company’s machines were used in the March 2006 Chicago primaries.
“When I first raised concerns about the Smartmatic case with the U.S. Treasury Department, I knew it was ripe for a CFIUS investigation. There were just too many questions and lingering doubts, which Smartmatic was clearly unable to overcome,” Maloney said.
Sequoia Fails around the Nation
Florida's Palm Beach County, right now, reports that 12,000 votes were not counted by Sequoia's optical scanners in its unending nightmare of conflicting results from the August election. That's where 3,400 votes (or 3500, depending on which news article you read) went missing, then were found, and now 12,000 more ballots have been found that the machines didn't count. This is an ongoing fiasco. Today's manual recount of 12,000 ambiguous votes "turned up an additional 159 uncounted ballots." South Florida's Sun Sentinel reported that "software issues" with Sequoia's optical scanners were to blame.
The August vote count troubles follow the June snafu, also in Palm Beach County, when the scanners failed to count 14% of the ballots. At that time, Palm Beach officials were looking to pay Sequoia more money to take over more of the ballot counting process. In January's presidential primary, "defective cartridges" prevented Palm Beach from posting results for several hours. Yet, still, no one in Palm Beach is considering junking the machines, although voters reportedly did dump Elections Director, Arthur Anderson.
Washington, D.C. election officials have had enough, and have subpoenaed Sequoia records to explain why over 12,000 "phantom votes" appeared in the software driven results from this month's primary. When D.C. officials ran the supposedly "faulty" cartridges through the same software, three different results were produced. When they hand counted three precincts, none of the totals matched Sequoia's reported totals.
scoop
Twenty states and the District of Columbia plan to use Sequoia Voting Systems in what is shaping up to be the third questionable presidential "election" in a row
Originally posted by Anonymous ATS
Very interesting indeed, i am very curious to watch the coming american election and wheather or not we have another instince of obvious election tampering....