Kanekoa (@KanekoaTheGreat)

Los Angeles Times: Ballot Firm’s Ties to Venezuela Criticized (2006) An Oakland company that provides electronic voting machines in California and 19 other states is drawing scrutiny over its acquisition last year by a group of Venezuelan investors with past business ties to the government of President Hugo Chavez. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) last month wrote U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow asking whether the Bush administration had weighed the national security implications of “a company with possible ties to the Venezuelan government” selling touch-screen voting machines for U.S. elections. Sequoia, founded in Jamestown, N.Y., in the late 1890s, was acquired in March 2005 by Smartmatic Corp., a private company owned by Venezuelan investors through a series of holding companies based in Europe and the Caribbean. Smartmatic emerged from obscurity the year before when it won a $100-million contract to supply touch-screen voting machines for an ultimately unsuccessful recall effort against Chavez in 2004. Before the election, Smartmatic was part of a consortium that included a software company partly owned by a Venezuelan government agency. The company markets optical scanners, which electronically tabulate ballots marked by voters, and touch-screen machines, on which votes are recorded using technology similar to that found in automated teller machines. Concerns about Smartmatic’s offshore ownership are fueling broader worries that computerized voting systems are vulnerable to hackers and political manipulation. Chicago Alderman Edward Burke cited Sequoia’s Venezuelan ownership in his complaint about the company’s performance during March primary elections in his city and surrounding Cook County. Problems with merging results from two new types of voting machines supplied by Sequoia led to a days-long delay in posting final results. Burke, who chaired an investigation into the incident, said he was bothered by reports that Venezuelan technicians and engineers “were in the Chicago tabulating rooms counting votes” on election night. Burke contends that Sequoia’s complex ownership “is designed to make it difficult to learn who the real controlling interests are.” Sequoia’s parent company, Boca Raton, Fla.-based Smartmatic, is controlled by Smartmatic International Holdings of Amsterdam. The holding company is owned by Smartmatic International Group of Curacao in the Dutch Antilles, a string of Caribbean islands near the Venezuelan coast. Antonio Mujica, a citizen of Venezuela and Spain who lives in Caracas, Venezuela, founded the parent company in 2000 and, along with his family, owns a 75% stake. The company’s Venezuelan owners made “extra efforts to make it appear that Smartmatic is purely a [U.S.] company,” said Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action, an electronic voting watchdog group in Berkeley. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jun-03-fi-sequoia3-story.html @KanekoaTheGreat