fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
Monday, Oct. 30, 2006 11:21 a.m. EST
Voting Machines Used in 'Rigged' Chavez Election
The controversy swirling around Smartmatic Corp. – which supplies voting machines to many U.S. states – doesn’t begin with the recent reports that the company has links to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s regime.
In fact, Chavez insisted on using machines supplied by Smartmatic – which is reportedly owned by Venezuelans – for his 2004 recall election.
And that election was so rigged in advance in favor of Chavez that the European Union (EU) refused to play an observer’s role, NewsMax reported at the time.
"Unfortunately, it has not been possible to secure with the Venezuelan electoral authorities the conditions to carry out an observation in line with the Union’s standard methodology,” according to a Wall Street Journal report shortly after the election.
The recent controversy erupted with the revelation that Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, which has supplied voting equipment in 17 U.S. states, was acquired last year by Smartmatic.
Before that, a Venezuelan government financing agency invested more than $200,000 in a technology company that has some of the same owners as Smartmatic. In return, the Venezuelan agency took a 28 percent stake in the technology company and a seat on its board of directors, according to the New York Times.
"Sequoia and Smartmatic are not connected, owned or controlled by the Venezuelan government whatsoever,” said Jeff Bialos, an attorney representing the two companies.
But Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said she welcomed the formal review of the two firms’ possible links to Chavez that has been launched by the federal government, and declared: "It’s a national security issue. Having a foreign government investing or owning a company in this country that makes voting machines could raise a question about the integrity of the elections.”
The Chavez government’s awarding of the contract for voting machines to Smartmatic back in 2004 – without a transparent bidding process – was just one of many irregularities cited by observers.
Exit polls showed that 58 percent of voters favored ousting Chavez and only 41 percent wanted him retained. But election officials conveniently reported that 58 percent of voters wanted to retain Chavez and 41 percent wanted him ousted. As a result, the staunchly anti-American friend of Fidel Castro remained in office.
As NewsMax reported in August 2004, Thor Halvorssen, First Amendment scholar at The Commonwealth Foundation in New York and a Venezuelan citizen, spelled out a several of the election’s shocking irregularities, including:
Thousands of voters, including Halvorssen, were mysteriously removed from the voting rolls.
Citizenship was granted to half a million illegal aliens in a crude vote-buying scheme.
Citizens were "migrated" away from their local polling places. One opposition leader was moved to a voting center in a city seven hours away. Another man, Miguel Romero, had for years voted in his neighborhood school in a Caracas suburb, but the Electoral Council computer indicated that he was to vote at the Venezuelan Embassy in Stockholm.
Venezuelan diplomatic posts around the world "inexplicably ran out of passports. Many Venezuelan expatriates were thus prevented from returning to their country to vote,” said Halvorssen.
His report in the Wall Street Journal also disclosed that bands of Chavez’s thugs brutally assaulted citizens in Caracas who were peacefully protesting the rigged election results, and fired indiscriminately into the crowd.
A 61-year-old grandmother was shot in the back and killed, and Halvorssen’s own mother was shot and severely injured.
Another report, from two observers working on behalf of the Organization of American States, said the election results did not reflect the will of the people "if the focus includes Mr. Chavez’s pre-election maneuvers that tilted the table in his favor through control of the electoral apparatus and indirect intimidation.”
Writing in Canada’s Globe and Mail, Ken Frankel and John Graham also stated that thousands of citizens who had signed the petition that trigged the recall election "lost jobs, pensions or suffered harassment. Many feared that their choice would be known to the government, and the ubiquitous presence of machine-gun-toting soldiers inside and outside the polling stations reinforced this concern.”
The most widely heralded outside observer of the election, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, ignored demands that the recall results be investigated, despite the restrains that had been placed on observers.
Among the restraints, objected to by the EU, were that observers were not allowed to independently audit the entire vote, and their freedom of movement was restricted.
Nevertheless, Carter claimed in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that his monitoring center "observed the entire voting process without limitation or restraint.”
The Journal opined that Carter’s "complicity in the prevention of a reliable vote count was a betrayal of Venezuelan democracy.”
Voting Machines Used in 'Rigged' Chavez Election
The controversy swirling around Smartmatic Corp. – which supplies voting machines to many U.S. states – doesn’t begin with the recent reports that the company has links to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s regime.
In fact, Chavez insisted on using machines supplied by Smartmatic – which is reportedly owned by Venezuelans – for his 2004 recall election.
And that election was so rigged in advance in favor of Chavez that the European Union (EU) refused to play an observer’s role, NewsMax reported at the time.
"Unfortunately, it has not been possible to secure with the Venezuelan electoral authorities the conditions to carry out an observation in line with the Union’s standard methodology,” according to a Wall Street Journal report shortly after the election.
The recent controversy erupted with the revelation that Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, which has supplied voting equipment in 17 U.S. states, was acquired last year by Smartmatic.
Before that, a Venezuelan government financing agency invested more than $200,000 in a technology company that has some of the same owners as Smartmatic. In return, the Venezuelan agency took a 28 percent stake in the technology company and a seat on its board of directors, according to the New York Times.
"Sequoia and Smartmatic are not connected, owned or controlled by the Venezuelan government whatsoever,” said Jeff Bialos, an attorney representing the two companies.
But Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said she welcomed the formal review of the two firms’ possible links to Chavez that has been launched by the federal government, and declared: "It’s a national security issue. Having a foreign government investing or owning a company in this country that makes voting machines could raise a question about the integrity of the elections.”
The Chavez government’s awarding of the contract for voting machines to Smartmatic back in 2004 – without a transparent bidding process – was just one of many irregularities cited by observers.
Exit polls showed that 58 percent of voters favored ousting Chavez and only 41 percent wanted him retained. But election officials conveniently reported that 58 percent of voters wanted to retain Chavez and 41 percent wanted him ousted. As a result, the staunchly anti-American friend of Fidel Castro remained in office.
As NewsMax reported in August 2004, Thor Halvorssen, First Amendment scholar at The Commonwealth Foundation in New York and a Venezuelan citizen, spelled out a several of the election’s shocking irregularities, including:
Thousands of voters, including Halvorssen, were mysteriously removed from the voting rolls.
Citizenship was granted to half a million illegal aliens in a crude vote-buying scheme.
Citizens were "migrated" away from their local polling places. One opposition leader was moved to a voting center in a city seven hours away. Another man, Miguel Romero, had for years voted in his neighborhood school in a Caracas suburb, but the Electoral Council computer indicated that he was to vote at the Venezuelan Embassy in Stockholm.
Venezuelan diplomatic posts around the world "inexplicably ran out of passports. Many Venezuelan expatriates were thus prevented from returning to their country to vote,” said Halvorssen.
His report in the Wall Street Journal also disclosed that bands of Chavez’s thugs brutally assaulted citizens in Caracas who were peacefully protesting the rigged election results, and fired indiscriminately into the crowd.
A 61-year-old grandmother was shot in the back and killed, and Halvorssen’s own mother was shot and severely injured.
Another report, from two observers working on behalf of the Organization of American States, said the election results did not reflect the will of the people "if the focus includes Mr. Chavez’s pre-election maneuvers that tilted the table in his favor through control of the electoral apparatus and indirect intimidation.”
Writing in Canada’s Globe and Mail, Ken Frankel and John Graham also stated that thousands of citizens who had signed the petition that trigged the recall election "lost jobs, pensions or suffered harassment. Many feared that their choice would be known to the government, and the ubiquitous presence of machine-gun-toting soldiers inside and outside the polling stations reinforced this concern.”
The most widely heralded outside observer of the election, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, ignored demands that the recall results be investigated, despite the restrains that had been placed on observers.
Among the restraints, objected to by the EU, were that observers were not allowed to independently audit the entire vote, and their freedom of movement was restricted.
Nevertheless, Carter claimed in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that his monitoring center "observed the entire voting process without limitation or restraint.”
The Journal opined that Carter’s "complicity in the prevention of a reliable vote count was a betrayal of Venezuelan democracy.”
