Usually outsourcing is welcoming by the Bush adminitration. And electronic voting machines? Well, Republicans seem to think they're infallible. But now the
New York Times reports:
The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist government of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
This is the company that now owns the company that makes Sequoia machines, the main rival to Diebold. Incidentally, my county in New Jersey votes on Sequoia machines.
Apparently when the voting machines are made by Republican partisans, it's okay, but Chavez is another matter. Yet I can't help but think that if the one case is suspicious, so it the other.
By the way, this is actually a side effect of the Dubai ports controversy, where Democrats pushed for review of foreign takeovers. The same panel is investigating.
But role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic have become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts.
"The government should know who owns our voting machines -- that is a national-security concern," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review the Sequoia takeover.
"There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of the company," Ms. Maloney said of Smartmatic in a telephone interview yesterday. "The Cfius process, if it is moving forward, can determine that."
I'm quoting the NY Times, but the sory was originally broken by the Miami Herald. Here's one good quote from them:
Botched municipal elections involving Sequoia machines in Chicago in March added to the suspicions.
When the Chicago City Council grilled Sequoia executive Jack Blaine in April, he revealed that 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.
Overall, I'm not quite sure what to make of the whole thing. But it sure seems like if the machines are unquestionable, no one would care who owned the company.