“Venezuela’s electoral council is scrapping its 6-year-old voting machines and replacing them with touch-screen computers from a tiny South Florida company whose machines have never been used in an election anywhere,” the Miami Herald reports.
“The switch – coming as President Hugo Chavez maneuvers to avoid a recall referendum – has sparked a fury among his opponents, who say the new machines from Boca Raton-based Smartmatic Corp. could be used to manipulate the tally in a recall vote and other elections,” the Herald says.
“It could also cast an international spotlight on the reliability of electronic voting systems, hotly debated since the 2000 U.S. presidential election and Florida’s ensuing hanging chad, butterfly-ballot chaos. ‘We have no trust in these new machines. We are afraid they are preparing to cheat us, and we have reasons to be worried,’ said opposition congressman Edgar Zambrano.
“The National Electoral Council’s five-member board awarded the contract to Smartmatic and its partners on Feb. 16 amid objections by the two board members sympathetic to the opposition that they had been shut out.
“‘The selection process was secret and it didn’t allow us to get any information about the bidders and their products,’ board member Sobella Mejias wrote in a letter to the rest of the council.”
Source:
Richard Brand, “Untried Fla. vote device to be tried in Venezuela,” Miami Herald, April 20, 2004, as part of package from Rep. Carolyn Maloney to Treasury Secretary John Snow, May 4, 2006,
1.Letter_to_Sec_Dep_Treasury_CarolynMaloney
2.www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world
1. Credible concerns about electronic “manipulation” of Smartmatic systems are now more than 20 years old since this Miami Herald article. Have these concerns been adequately addressed in the United States since that time?
2. Who were the main figures in the United States who responded to the Herald’s Smartmatic investigations? What became of their concerns and actions? Why have they lost interest?
3. If Smartmatic Software was developed for the Venezuelan goverment of Hugo Chávez to keep him in power by fraudulent means, is there any guarantee that the Smartmatic software was not tailor-made to suit the interest of the Venezuelan regime and its allies and sponsors?
4. Has any widely recognized, neutral company or institution independently audited the Smartmatic software and source code since this article appeared in 2004?
Comments are closed.