I love election time...
Cheers,
RAH
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http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52668
WorldNetDaily
Saturday, October 28, 2006
U.S. voting-machine shocker:
Does Hugo Chavez own 'em?
Feds probe money trail behind company
for ties to Castroite Venezuelan president
Posted: October 28, 2006
9:30 p.m. Eastern
WASHINGTON - Just 10 days before Americans vote in midterm congressional
elections that could result in a historic shift of power, the federal
government is investigating whether anti-American Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez may control the company that operates electronic voting machines in
17 states.
Many questions have been raised about the reliability of the new machines,
which leave no paper trails for the purposes of recounts. But now federal
officials are investigating whether Smartmatic, owner of Sequoia Voting
Systems, is secretly controlled by the Castroite revolutionary leader of
Venezuela who denounced President Bush as Satan in his most recent United
Nations address, the Miami Herald reports.
An informal investigation of Smartmatic's ownership begun last summer has,
the paper reveals, become a formal probe.
One of the other major concerns raised about the electronic voting systems
is that they could, under the right circumstances, be tampered with to
deliver fraudulent results.
The investigation stems from a May 4 inquiry to the Treasury Department by
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., raising concerns about Smartmatic's purchase
of Sequoia last year. Maloney said she was disturbed by a 2004 article in
the Miami Herald revealing that the Venezuelan government owned 28 percent
of Bizta - a company operated by two of the same people who own Smartmatic.
In a deal with twists and turns even federal investigators are having
trouble following, Bizta bought back those shares after the article
appeared, and Smartmatic now characterizes the deal as a loan.
Bizta and Smartmatic had partnered with the Venezuelan telephone company
CANTV to win a $91 million contract to supply electronic voting machines
for Venezuelan elections, including the controversial 2004 referendum
Chavez won in a vote in which he was widely accused of fraud.
Despite the probe, Smartmatic categorically denies any link to the Chavez
regime.
"Smartmatic is a privately held corporation, and no foreign government or
entity - including Venezuela - has ever held an ownership stake in the
company," Mitch Stoller, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail to the
Miami Herald.
"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, told the New York Times tonight.
But the Venezuelan connections have haunted the company whose machines have
been plagued with problems in U.S. elections.
When the Chicago City Council asked Sequoia executive Jack Blaine in April
about problems in that city's voting, he said some Venezuelans had provided
technical support during the election and that some of the glitches could
be traced to a component developed in Venezuela to print and transmit
results to a central tabulation computer.
The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners is withholding further payment
to Sequoia until after the Nov. 7 election.
The Smartmatic investigation is being conducted by the Treasury-led
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS - which
determines whether deals involving foreign investors compromise national
security.
Determining whether there really is a hidden connection to Chavez or anyone
in his government is difficult because of Smartmatic's complex, though
legal, corporate structure, reports the Miami Herald.
Stoller admitted the company is 97 percent owned by the four Venezuelan
founders - two of them dual citizens: Mugica (Spanish and Venezuelan),
Anzola, Roger Piqate and Jorge Massa (French and Venezuelan). The remainder
of the company, Stoller told the paper, is owned "by employees of
Smartmatic (past and present) and family and acquaintances of the founders."
The four top owners have not said whether they support or oppose Chavez.
"The government should know who owns our voting machines - that is a
national-security concern," said Maloney, who started the investigation
with her letter last May. "There seems to have been an obvious effort to
obscure the ownership of the company."
Chavez has made it clear his goal in life is to bring the U.S. to its
knees. He has stood with Iran against the U.S. and, as WND reported
Thursday, he is providing documents that could help terrorists infiltrate
the U.S.-Mexico, according to a new congressional report on homeland
security.
"Venezuela is providing support - including identity documents - that could
prove useful to radical Islamic groups," says the report of the
subcommittee on investigations of the House Homeland Security Committee.
"The Venezuelan government has issued thousands of cidulas, the equivalent
of Social Security cards, to people from places such as Cuba, Colombia and
Middle Eastern nations that host foreign terrorist organizations."
The documents can be used to obtain Venezuelan passports and American
visas, which in turn allow the holder to elude immigration checks and enter
the United States.
As WorldNetDaily reported, a Venezuelan military defector claims Chavez
developed ties to terrorist groups such as al-Qaida - even providing the
group with $1 million in cash after Sept. 11, 2001.
Air Force Maj. Juan Diaz Castillo, who was Chavez's pilot, told
WorldNetDaily through an interpreter that "the American people should
awaken and be aware of the enemy they have just three hours' flight from
the United States."
Diaz said he was part of an operation in which Chavez gave $1 million to
al-Qaida for relocation costs, shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on the United States.
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R. A. Hettinga