Sequoia Voting Systems/Smartmatic: A shocking 2008 election conspiracy ExposeD.

(this is a copy of post from another thread on a different subject and in a different forum, it deserves it's own discussion)


The manufacturer of Palm Beach's voting machines is Sequoia Voting Systems.

As most of us are unfamiliar with them let me share with you some of their history:

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...

When an independent group tried to investigate the hacking, they got this response from the company:

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)

Then there's this worrying news:

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

Who is Smartmatic? A Venezuelan company:

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

So let's see if I can get this straight.

Smartmatic, a Venezuelan company, which was used in the failed recall referendum of president Hugo Chavez and accused of election fraud wiki, AND who's founder has recently been shown to have ties to drug smuggling and the CIA:

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

You HAVE to read the whole article/page to believe it.

WOW!

CIA - Drug smuggling - Hugo Chavez - Rigged Venezuelan elections - Venezuelan company - all the way to voting machines which keep failing in US elections, will not allow outside investigations and are about to be used in Florida of all places for the presidential elections.

AND as mentioned above they make systems for people registration and authentication for government applications.

How's that for a conspiracy?





[edit on 9/22/2008 by schrodingers dog]

Mod Edit: Removed Formatting

[edit on 23-9-2008 by Gemwolf]

Just to add to the intrigue:

The new CFO of Smartmatic, Mr. Yanes.

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.

smartmatic.com



[edit on 9/22/2008 by schrodingers dog]

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....

OK So now we have Diebold with faulty machines... Sequoia with faulty machines and a voting base far too large for older more reliable??? methods...

What is the answer...???

When I am presented with a problem from one of my officers, I also require them to present me a solution...

The way I see it, especially after the last election, is the losers will always cry foul, whether there was in fact or not...

But with exposed malfunctions and now hacking, that cry of foul will carry some considerable weight..

Semper

reply to post by semperfortis


Semper, did you read the last article?

Unreliable machines are the least of our worries imho.

We could have a combination of Hugo Chavez, the CIA, and drug cartels rigging the outcome of the elections.

Sequoia has machines everywhere!

Don't you agree?

reply to post by schrodingers dog


If both sides are rigging, then it's simply a matter of who rigs better...

I for one don't think that Armando Yañes being from Venezuela automatically means Hugo Chavez is involved somehow....

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...

Semper

Well Smartmatic is under investigation for helping Hugo Chavez rig the Venezuelan referendum.
I am just getting started with this investigation, and you are right, more conclusive evidence is needed.
I'm on it.
Not a bad start though.

I'll look into this deeper after i clear my head right now i'm focused on the U.S. economy crisis. But at first glance Its not a question of who can rig better but who can pay the hackers more to hack the machines and rig the elections in their favor.

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...

Here's something to get us started:

Why is Hugo Chávez Involved With U.S. Voting Machines

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.

The latest on this as stated before, is that even though Smartmatic claimed to have "sold" Sequoia, the truth is:

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.

wikipedia

They even tricked congress into stopping their investigation:

“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.

source

This story goes deep.
I'll keep digging.





[edit on 9/22/2008 by schrodingers dog]

It does make a little sense that ol' Hugo Chavez would want to interfere with the U.S. Elections though. With his mind set he sees McCain as a 3rd term of Bush and he probably thinks the U.S. is going to bomb Venezuela back to the stone age

and this pilot is suppose to be in prison instead he is out flying around running drugs for the CIA in a plane they possibly own. And a plane that crashed due to both its engines failing. i'm not a pilot but the little i do know it is very rare that both engines would fail at the same time unless something was done to them or they ran out of fuel.

This is very interesting SD keep digging man

Ok, so I managed to find all this info out in a matter of an evening.
One of my questions is this: Why he Palm Beach board of elections, knowing it's own embarrassing history with voting machines, would:

a. purchase machines with a incredibly bad reliability history.
b. why did they not do their diligent research to uncover who is behind these machines.

I don't actually believe that they are just knuckleheads.

The information is too easy find. So obviously someone there and in other parts of the country must have pushed this through.

This investigation may get very messy by the time it's over.

Just for the record I wanted to add all the other Sequoia Voting Systems recent mess ups:

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

And if there is a conspiracy here, this is the extent to which it can affect the next presidential elections:

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

(same source)

reply to post by schrodingers dog


Hey dog, makes you wonder who is really piloting the ship.. If you put 2 candidates in the box????? The mind has no idea what independence is, although it occurs every 4th of July.

When people go to the store "Paper or Plastic??" One is bio-degradable.. one is not? your choice???

When it comes to elections.. "Paper Ballot or Computer"?? is more technology more infallible than the other. Where does the corruption lie, in the computer? or the man? or is there a difference???

reply to post by mapsurfer_


I close to agree about the candidates.

But the conspiracy that seems to be unfolding before us her is a little different.

When you have 20 + states using these machines affecting the results of the elections, which have been proven to be vulnerable to hacking, and the software belongs to a Venezuelan company with now is proven ties to Hugo Chavez, the CIA, and drug cartels, and which has already rigged a referendum.

I mean how much more of a conspiracy theory do you want.

You could literally and without having to fetch too far have Hugo Chavez pick the next presidente of the US. And imagine who could be behind Chavez pulling the strings?

There's a LOT to sort out here before we can get a clear picture.

reply to post by schrodingers dog


What makes this one interesting to me.. the race card and gender card which I believe were political strategies that were calculated. It's not so much about the pawns, but more about winning and the end game. It's like chess on a cosmic scale.

edit: wrong thread, sorry, please remove.
[edit on 9/23/2008 by schrodingers dog]
edit: I fixed it back

reply to post by mapsurfer_


This one, if proven, could literally draw a straight line from the most powerful individuals in the world, to a little old lady voting in Palm Beach.
It's almost like a novel in real life.
That' why it's so interesting for me to follow the clues to uncover where this leads.


[edit on 9/23/2008 by schrodingers dog]

What's more, if it gets out that so many machines' software is owned by a Venezuelan company with ties to Chavez, the people will be up in arms.




[edit on 9/23/2008 by schrodingers dog]

[edit on 9/23/2008 by schrodingers dog]

reply to post by schrodingers dog

There are big broad implications here.. the US is melting pot of culture, race and religion.. and is a good sample for this experiment. Perhaps this is the next major step in our evolution. Either we love on another, or kill one another. I am just kidding here, but if you examine the ingredients if this election, we have the most interesting candidates. Young/Old White/Black Male/Female

Its all there. perhaps God or Aliens want to know what we will do next?? I think the stage is set for the big show.

reply to post by mapsurfer_


You confuse me map surfer.
I think I agree but I can't really tell.
Could you clarify god and aliens please?

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....

Well, let's put it this way.
Obviously like any conspiracy, the objective here is to not get caught.
The problem I foresee here is the following:

Let's assume for a second that even though there is so much evidence that there is a conspiracy going on here, that it is all a coincidence.

And that the conspiracy is the other way around.

This is the image that is evolving in my head.
This is all a sequence of layered backup plans in case Obama wins.
The first defense is massive election day voting machine breakdowns.
When asked why the machines broke they will announce that the software is Venezuelan.
Then they will announce the ties of the company to Hugo Chavez.
The whole country will be up in arms about it and we will have another election.
But in this election Obama is now the candidate the Hugo Chavez wants, making him free fall in the polls.
McCain wins.

This is my first go at trying to solve this puzzle, but it's pretty plausible as a back up plan.







[edit on 9/23/2008 by schrodingers dog]