This is an expansion on a diary submitted by Joan Reports last night. I had to find an answer -- why did the owner of this country's third largest electronic voting machine supplier, a citizen of Venezuela, have his U.S. entry visa revoked?
From joan reports' diary, CEO of Sequoia Voting is denied entry to US:
Sequoia Voting Systems company was sold in March (for a song, $16 million) to a Venezuelan-owned company -- Smartmatic. The new US headquarters is in Boca Raton. DeLaRue, the former owner, just cashed out of Sequoia at a loss.
And stranger still, last week our government denied permission for Sequoia's new CEO Antonio Mujica to return to the US.
Our embassy in Venezuela has revoked his visa...
What can we make of this?
I've googled together a glimpse into the history of Sequoia's parent company, Smartmatic, and it clearly reveals what the U.S. Embassy already knows: Hugo Chavez's government is corrupt to the core, and his special recall election last summer was rigged by Antonio Mujica!
Serious and valid doubts about the vote's legitimacy from the Bush administration were mostly dismissed by observers, including Jimmy Carter. Evidence linking two of Mr. Mujika companies to Venezuelan government officials was ingnored. Chavez government financing also ignored.
Instead, they were impressed by Smartmatic's touch-screen terminals that recorded and tallied the vote nationwide. The clincher - these machines printed backup records. By simple contrast to growning concerns over the lack printers in the U.S., the Smartmatic terminal looked tamper-proof.
With a year of hindsight, official U.S. doubts seem to have been justified -- a vivid example of what happens when the U.S. loses its moral authority to question such matters.
Antonio Mujica and the fortunes of Hugo Chavez
After his "re-election" in August, 2004. U.S. News and World Reports wrote a story, Exit Polls in Venezuela:
"With Venezuela's voting set to end at 8 p.m. EST according to election officials, final exit poll results from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, an independent New York-based polling firm, show a major victory for the 'Yes' movement, defeating Chavez in the Venezuela presidential recall referendum." The poll showed 59 percent in favor of recalling Chavez, 41 percent against.
The next morning, Chavez was declared the winner by an almost exact opposite margin. "About 58 percent said 'no' to a recall, while 42 percent said 'yes,'" wrote the Washington Post.
...it's something of a scandal that American news media have been taking the official vote count in Venezuela at face value. There is very good reason to believe that the exit poll had the result right, and that Chavez's election officials--and Carter and the American media--got it wrong.
...One weapon against [election] fraud is the exit poll. As Doug Schoen of Penn Schoen points out, his firm has conducted exit polls in Mexico and, just a few days ago, in the Dominican Republic, which produced results very close to the election results. His partner Mark Penn points out that the firm conducted two previous exit polls in Venezuela, both of which were on the mark.
The Penn Schoen exit poll was conducted at about 200 polling places and produced more than 20,000 responses... The firm employed supervisors to make sure the polling was done right. And its results by precinct can be checked against the official results reported for that precinct.
In contrast, it would be far easier, given the touch-screen voting method and central tabulation used in Venezuela, for the central counting center to falsify the results. All you would have to do is program the computer to count every sixth "yes" vote as a "no."
[Jimmy Carter's election monitors] could not have determined whether the counting computer was misprogrammed. Chavez had every motive for cheating: polls before the election mostly showed him under 50 percent, and he should have reasonably concluded that those not for him were against. Adjusting the count was one sure way to win.
Sound familiar? This article was written a full two months before the U.S. elections. While our exiting polling anomaly was a big story, I don't recall anyone raising the then very recent results in Venezuela.
Wired followed up with this piece soon after:
Last February, as Chavez was facing a recall, Venezuela's National Electoral Council, or CNE, announced plans to replace the nation's 6-year-old U.S.-made optical-scan voting machines with new touch-screen machines made by two unknown companies based in Florida and Venezuela.
The five-member council, which is dominated by Chavez supporters, awarded the $91-million contract to Smartmatic, maker of the voting machine hardware, and Bizta, maker of the software that programmed the ballots and tabulated the votes. The companies are run jointly by two 30-year-old Venezuelan engineers, whose machines had never been used in an election.
...[even though] the government was displeased with the [older electronic] machines [used in 2001], replacing them before the recall raised suspicion. Two Electoral Council members, who are sympathetic to the opposition parties, voted against the contract with Smartmatic and Bizta, saying they never received information about the bidders or their products before the vote.
As it turned out, the Venezuelan government owned 28 percent, or 3 million shares, of Bizta through investments in a venture capital fund. A top official from Venezuela's science ministry, who helped Chavez get elected in 1998, was also a member of Bizta's board of directors.
In 2004, The Miami Herald discovered that Bitza, Inc. was located at the same Florida address as Smartmatic. Mujica was the registered president, according to state corporate registration.
Venezuelan website
vcrisis.com reports even more:
Venezuelan journalist Orlando Ochoa Teran investigated the claims published by the Miami Herald and discovered that Venezuelan officials were behind the incorporation of Smartmatic. Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel and Venezuelan Ambassador to the USA Bernardo Alvarez Herrera are intimately related, either through long time friendship or consanguinity relationship, to the directors of Smartmatic. According to registry documents, that went missing after the Herald blew the whistle, the names associated to the company are Alfredo Anzola, Antonio Mugica and families Gabaldon-Anzola and Herrera-Oropeza [3]. The incorporation of Smartmatic took place in the Fifth Mercantile Registry, located in the ground floor of tower B in "Cubo Negro" building in Chuao Caracas. Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel's daughter -lawyer Gisela Rangel Avalos de D'Armas was, at the time, the head of the said registry.
Mr. Mujica is a tool of Hugo Chavez. It is possible that Smartmatic was created for the purpose of assuring a Chavez win. Not metrely a good company gone bad -- it could have been born of corruption.
With Chavez bloodmoney, Smartmatic positioned itself into the sensitive belly of American democracy.
And let's be clear about Hugo Chavez:
- He is the most vocal anti-American foreign leader in recent memory.
- He has threatened to halt oil shipments to the U.S.
- He announced the euro will replace the dollar for oil transactions.
- His circle of friends are a who's-who of the world's most repressive leaders.
Hugo Chavez has an "agent" running the 3rd largest voting service in the U.S. - how can this not be a threat to national security?
Late or not, credit should go out to the anonymous souls at the Department of State who finally "got it".
US Embassy in Venezuela revokes visa of Smartmatic owner:
16.10.05 | Antonio Mujica, CEO of Smartmatic, got very upset Friday morning whilst trying to renew his US tourist visa. The entrepreneur waited a good while before being called by a US Embassy's consular official, who informed him that his visa had not been approved. Mujica, very crossed, requested, in English, explanations as to the reasons for it. He argued that he was legal, that he had an important company in the USA and that he had to travel with urgency to that country.
The American Consul's rejection was categoric as a very disturbed Mujica left the embassy without uttering any words in Spanish or English.
Are there laws regarding foreign ownership in this field? It doesn't seem likely, since Sequoia was foreign owned for at least 3 years before Mujica took over. I don't know if there was ANY legal way to prevent the sale.
But we know this man's history, and Sequoia Voting has been compromised permanently. They need to be exposed and their machines seized.
Of the highest importance: The citizens, election officals and media in the counties that have bought his products must be informed! Some locales are voting in two weeks. Congress must be informed, and they need to figure out how an enemy of the state could simply buy his way into the core machine of our democracy.
A final note: I will leave White House conspiracy theories to others. This story is big, even without them.