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Spanish – 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.
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