Spanish – U.S. President Donald Trump does not give up. “I won the election,” he reiterated on Monday. And he did it through his favorite space: Twitter. His allegations of fraud make a lot of waves despite the setbacks in the courts and the silence of many media outlets. The links between the Venezuelan regime and the vote count raise doubts even among the believers in the invulnerability of American democracy.
Even though Jack Dorsey, the CEO of the platform that censors almost every message from the president, has been battling since election day, Trump knows the power of his Twitter account with just a comment or a retweet. He is the president of the first world power. This makes him the most powerful man on the planet. He has almost 90 million followers and a particular indomitable character that turns every word that comes out of his mouth or his keyboard into the news. On Monday, with only two words added to the complaint of a third party, he continued to put together pieces that support the thesis of fraud.
“A man named Peter Neffenger, a retired admiral, is president and serves on the board of directors of Smartmatic, which created the software for Dominion. Neffenger is part of Biden’s transition team,” reported a Twitter account with more than 321,000 followers that uses the name of Civil War general Stonewall Jackson. President Donald Trump retweeted this message, adding only the exclamation: “This is crazy!”
Who is Peter Neffenger?
On Monday, Newsweek magazine published an article confirming these connections. The article titled, Who Is Peter Neffenger? Biden Transition Team Member May Be Target of Trump Lawsuit, includes a profile of the controversial character.
“Peter Neffenger, a retired vice admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard and experienced national security official, was recently added to the roster of individuals tasked with supporting President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as they transition into office,” says Newsweek.
Neffenger also served as head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from 2015 to 2017 during the Barack Obama Administration, the magazine adds. When consulting the official website of the election software company, Smartmatic, it was possible to verify that Peter Nefffenger is indeed the president of the firm’s board of directors in the United States.
The information is official. The former federal prosecutor, Sidney Powell, who now works as a lawyer for the Trump campaign, denounced the irregularity that can be corroborated on the Biden-Harris website. Peter Neffenger, the chairman of the U.S. board of Smartmatic, the company linked to Dominion in the counting of votes in 28 states (including those claimed by Trump), is listed on Biden’s transition team as a volunteer for the Department of Homeland Security.
Smartmatic and its Chavista origins
On Thursday, November 12, the former mayor of New York and current personal lawyer of President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, denounced in an interview offered to Fox Business that Dominion Voting System is owned by Smartmatic, a company linked to the Venezuelan dictatorship.
“Smartmatic was founded in 2004. It was formed by three Venezuelans, who were very close to the dictator Hugo Chávez. It was created to fix elections. That is the company that owns Dominion. Although Dominion is Canadian, all of its software is from Smartmatic.”
Smartmatic’s name has been heard in Venezuela since 2004. That year, the same year in which the company was formed, its technology was used for the first time on the occasion of the recall referendum against Hugo Chávez. The experience was a bitter one. An electronic voting system that promised speedy results ended up being slower than manual counting.
Traditionally, voting tables in Venezuela closed at 6:00 pm, and two hours later, a first official bulletin was issued. At that time, the result took about 10 hours. The exit polls guaranteed Chavez’s defeat by a 20% difference. But the final result was the opposite.
The company led in the U.S. by one of Biden’s transition members today made headlines again in Venezuela in 2017. After lending itself to the election of the illegitimate National Constituent Assembly (ANC) in which only Chavista candidates participated, Smartmatic admitted that the announced result was manipulated.
“The difference between the announced amount and the one thrown by the system is at least one million voters,” said a few days after said elections, the executive director of the company, Antonio Mujica, as reported by BBC World.
The connection with Dominion
As Rudy Giuliani has pointed out, Dominion does not operate alone. “Dominion is a company owned by another company called Smartmatic, through an intermediary company called Indra.”
Dominion Voting System participated in the U.S. presidential election on November 3 in 28 states. These include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In these states, the early morning of November 4 showed the victory of the Republican by a wide margin, and finally, the result turned, and the Democratic candidate ended up winning, according to media projections.
Trump’s campaign team soon started alleging fraud and initiated legal proceedings in the courts of these states. Giuliani added to Fox Business what was reported by three different sources: “the funding for Dominion came from Venezuela.”
The company operated in more than half the country despite warnings about irregularities and inconsistencies. In 2019, the Texas Secretary of State refused to use Dominion’s ‘Suite 5.5A machine’ voting system because the company’s technology was considered “hackable,” Giuliani said. This is the same model used in these elections in key states such as Pennsylvania.
The warnings were not heeded
A 2019 report issued by the top Texas state official details, among the multiple failures of the company’s voting system, “the inability to verify and retain a party ballot, while not voting. Also, it was determined that this technology was prone to errors. It adds that “the scanner and tabulator were subject to paper jams, and to eliminate those jams, the protective seals had to be broken, allowing election officials to mislead voters.”
According to President Trump’s report, made public through Twitter, “Dominion removed 2.7 million votes from Trump nationally. Data analysis found that 221,000 Pennsylvania votes were switched from Trump to Biden. 941,000 were eliminated. States that used the Dominion voting system changed 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden.”
“REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN.” @ChanelRion @OANN
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2020
The company, which is chaired in the United States by one of Joe Biden’s transition team members, also participated directly in the vote count in Los Angeles County, California. 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 election procurement in North America.