AP: Venezuelan Co. to Sell U.S. Subsidiary (Sequoia Voting Systems)

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6297851,00.html

Do the brothers who own ES&S and Diebold have a third sibling?

Sec of State, and his chief aide, Alfie Charles, to peddle their machines, after Jones and Charles wrote the anti-democratic legislation that fostered this election theft technology in California--a prime example of the putrid practice of "revolving door employment."

Diebold's CEO until recently, Wally O'Dell, and other board members, have close ties to the Bush Junta. O'Dell was a Bush-Cheney campaign chair in '04, promised in writing to "deliver" Ohio to the Bush Junta, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for them (--a Bush "Pioneer" right up there with Ken Lay).

ES&S (a spinoff of Diebold) was initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things). Diebold and ES&S are run by two brothers, Bob and Tod Urosevich.

Together, Diebold and ES&S "counted" 80% of the U.S. vote in 2004, using TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, with one third of the voting systems in the country having no "paper trail" at all, and the rest having woefully inadequate auditing systems. This coup was made possible by $3.9 billion in boondoggle funding for unauditable electronic voting systems, engineered by the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress--Tom Delay and Bob Ney (abetted by corporatist 'Democrats' like Christopher Dodd). These extremely insecure, unreliable and insider hackable voting systems were fast-tracked across the country--as a result of the "Help America Vote For War Act" of 2002--in order to insure more war in the Middle East, more tax cuts for the rich and more destruction of American democratic institutions.

The Venezuelans, by the way, insist on hand-counting FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the paper ballot backup, cuz they don't trust the machines. Smart people, the Venezuelans*. Dumb us.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1901

We hand-count 0% to 1%, depending on the stranglehold that Diebold/ES&S and brethren have on local/state election officials and legislators.

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Venezuelans also view their democracy more favorably than all other South Americans view their own countries' democracies, except for Uruguay (which also has a leftist government and where the citizens rank their democracy even higher than Venezuelans rank theirs).

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2179

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Note: The Smartmatic/Venezuela thing was ridiculous, on its face, but especially in view of the control of our government by Saudi Arabia, and the control of our election system by Christian nutballs, major Bush donors and their allies, global corporate predators and vampires such as Halliburton and Exxon-Mobile.

December 22, 2006 (12:11 PM EST)

Voting machine provider Smartmatic Corp. and its Venezuelan owners will avoid a full U.S. national security investigation by putting the firm's Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. U.S. subsidiary up for sale.

Attention has been focused on the firm because of reports it has had business connections with the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who frequently attacks U.S. policy.

In an announcement Friday, Smartmatic said it has withdrawn from a review process that was scheduled to be carried out by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews foreign investments and acquisitions to determine whether they hold national security threats.

The firm got even closer attention after Chavez excoriated President Bush at the United Nations, calling him the devil incarnate. The CFIUS investigation was examining whether Smartmatic and Sequoia had or continue to have any connection to the Chavez government.

http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196701695