by Sean Jobst
19 December 2020
The oligarchs behind these machines have operated in United States elections under different names, with Dominion Voting Systems merely being the latest incarnation. Although based in London, Smartmatic has close ties to the Venezuelan Communist regime through its CEO, Antonio Mugica. It worked closely with the state-owned Bitza software company to ensure that Hugo Chávez could rig the 2004 presidential recall election, and has been used by his successor Maduro to ensure one-party Communist rule. Smartmatic entered the U.S. market by buying a failing American company called Sequoia Voting Systems: "After losing money for several years, on March 8, 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, a multi-national technology company which had developed advanced election systems, voting machines included. In November 2007, following a verdict by the CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States], Smartmatic was ordered to sell Sequoia, which it did to its Sequoia managers having U.S. citizenship. Sequoia Voting Systems was acquired by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems on June 4, 2010."
The Sequoia-Smartmatic connection was decisively outlined on several occasions. On March 30, 2005, the Michigan Department of Management and Budget Acquisition Services issued a document: "Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary company of Smartmatic International Corporation." On November 8, 2007, a Smartmatic press release announced a rebranding of Sequoia: "Leading voting technology provider Sequoia Voting Systems is pleased to announce the sale of the company to a group of private U.S. investors led by Sequoia's current executive management team." A Delaware court decision ruled on April 4, 2008 that "Smartmatic promises to grant to Hart a license to use its intellectual property currently found in Sequoia's machines." The Canadian-based corporation Dominion then bought Sequoia according to a press release on June 4, 2010: "Dominion Voting Systems Corporation today announced that it has acquired the assets of Sequoia Voting Systems, a major U.S. provider of voting solutions serving nearly 300 jurisdictions in 16 states."
Smartmatic entered U.S. elections during Chicago's city primaries on March 21, 2006, when problems related to the 19,000 Sequoia voting machines - worth $50 million - delayed results for a week. Although based in Boca Raton, Sequoia/Smartmatic president Jack Blaine testified before the Chicago City Council that his corporation was owned by the Venezuelan government and fifteen technicians came from Venezuela to repair the machines. Democratic Chicago Alderman Edward Burke raised concerns about this foreign subversion. In May and October 2006, Democratic New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney wrote letters to Treasury Secretary John Snow and his successor, Hank Paulson, stressing the threat using voting machines and software tied to a foreign regime had for national security. This led to a CFIUS investigation which Smartmatic escaped by selling Sequoia on December 22, 2006.
Our story does not end there. On March 8, 2010, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would force the divestiture of Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which cleared the way for Dominion to square away the U.S. voting machines industry through lucrative contracts with various states and counties. A far cry from their attitudes now, the gatekeepers at CNN were allowing an August 2006 report about Smartmatic's threats to electoral security. Even the New York Times expressed alarm about Smartmatic. Dominion entered into a contract with Smartmatic in 2009, in time to benefit from the DoJ decision in March 2010 - and thus began the consistent spate of real controversy about their use in various elections.
In March 2012, Dominion admitted a "shortcoming" in its software led to votes being given to the wrong winners in two city council races in Wellington, Florida: "County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher, who insisted a computer glitch rather than human error was to blame for the fiasco, claimed vindication after Dominion Voting Systems released its statement." Waldeep Singh, Dominion's Vice President of Customer Relations, admitted in his statement: "The incorrect reporting of vote totals which occurred in the Wellington election was caused by a mismatch between the software which generates the paper ballots and the central tally system. This synchronization difficulty is a shortcoming of the version of software currently being used in Palm Beach County and that shortcoming has been addressed in a subsequent version of the software. These enhancements help to prevent such an anomaly from occurring in the future. Dominion is in the process of providing this newer version to Palm Beach County."
In 2016, Progressive activist and lawyer Dana Jill Simpson, a former employee of the Soros-linked Tides Foundation, brought her concerns about Dominion machines helping the DNC establishment steal the Democratic primaries from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, to the FBI but they ignored her. That same year, Fox News interviewed Princeton University computer scientist Andrew Appel, who demonstrated just how easy it was to tamper with the voting machines - he wrote a tampering program on a memory card, opened the lid and inserted the card with a screwdriver, in a process that only took seven minutes. At the DEFCON hacking conference on August 11, 2017, a CNNTech report demonstrated hackers easily breaking into those machines. In April 2018, New York Times Opinion shared a video, "How I Hacked an Election", with a demonstration by University of Michigan computer science Prof. J. Alex Halderman. It showed a mock election at the University, followed by him hacking the machines and manipulating the results. He warned how such machines are prone to cyber attacks "that can change votes".
After "Maryland's main election system vendor was bought by a parent company with ties to a Russian oligarch" in 2015, which the state's election officials didn't find out until July 2018, Democratic Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin introduced the Election Vendor Security Act that would've prevented states from "contracting with firms owned or influenced by non-US citizens" according to an April 2019 report in The Guardian that also cited firms such as Dominion and Scytl. In December 2019, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA), Ron Wyden (OR), and Amy Klobuchar (MN), and Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan (WI) sent a letter to the CEOs of H.I.G. Capital, LLC, which invested in the Smartmatic-linked Hart InterCivic. They warned of machines "switching votes" and counting "improbable results" that "threaten the integrity of our elections". Giving examples of "nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states" - vote switching in South Carolina, busted machines in Indiana, and paper ballots rejected by machines in Missouri - the letter concluded: "These problems threaten the integrity of our elections and demonstrate the importance of election systems that are strong, durable, and not vulnerable to attack."
In 2015, election officials in 31 states - representing 40 million registered voters - warned about outdated machines, with nearly every state "using some machines that are no longer manufactured" according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Even when state and local officials tried replacing outdated machines, many continued to "run on old software that will soon be outdated and more vulnerable to hackers" according to the same Associated Press that now determines elections and denies any flaws with Dominion in 2020. Denver businessman Eric Coomer, who became Dominion's Vice President of U.S. Engineering in 2010 and publicly expresses far-leftist views, admitted in a 2016 video that Dominion did not update its software to protect against fraud. On August 13, 2019, the contract between Dominion and the County of Santa Clara in California included clause 2.26 that "Allows staff to adjust tally based on review of scanned ballot images."
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| An image from Dominion's website. Keep in mind that in some states, not all counties use the machines - but the ones that swayed the election do. |
Several states and counties primarily relied on Dominion Voting machines for the 2020 election. I'll start with my neighboring state of Georgia. Following the contentious 2018 governor's race, Republican Governor Brian Kemp cultivated ties with voting machine corporations: In January 2019, he hired former ES&S lobbyist Chuck Harper as his deputy chief of staff. These ties led Oregon senator Ron Wyden to warn how the voting machine lobby "literally thinks they are just above the law, they are accountable to nobody, they have been able to hotwire the political system in certain parts of the country like we've seen in Georgia". In summer 2019, Dominion was awarded a contract worth $106,842,590.80 by the State of Georgia. That November, the state "rushed" to install 30,000 Dominion machines in time for the March 24th primary elections.
To "rush" through something would obviously make it prone to fraud, but exactly this occurred as a bipartisan agreement of the duopoly establishment in Georgia. On March 6, 2020, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger signed off on a legal agreement with the Democratic Party of Georgia to alter the state's absentee ballot procedures, including changing the manner the ballots were counted and jettisoning the requirement for signature verification. This agreement violated the Constitution, which enables legislatures as responsible for any electoral process changes. On election day, a software glitch delayed the counting of thousands of ballots in Gwinnett County, as occurred earlier with Spalding and Morgan Counties. Gwinnett County specifically blamed Dominion for the error. Given what we've already documented about such glitches in previous years' elections, the problems with Dominion machines appear to be structural.
These and other problems forced Raffensperger and other officials to consent to a recount, but elections officials were instructed to report original vote totals despite several cases of recounts reducing Biden's alleged 13,000-vote lead. In Dekalb County, an error that added an extra 0 to 1000 votes gave Biden 9,000 votes in a precinct where his tally was actually 900. An audit added 284 ballots in Walton County, netting an extra 176 votes for Trump. More than 2,600 ballots were found to not be uploaded from a memory card in Floyd County, giving Trump an extra 800 votes. A similar failure in one Douglas County precinct uncovered 156 votes for Biden, 128 for Trump, seven for Jorgenson, and two ballots with no presidential selection made. A memory card discovered in Fayette County uncovered 2,755 votes in a hand-tally - 1,577 for Trump, 1,128 for Biden, 43 for Jorgensen, and seven write-ins. A forensic test of a Dominion machine in Ware County ran equal number of Trump and Biden votes, which altered 37 Trump votes to Biden, in what USA Today blamed on "human error, not vote-flipping". A Voter GA press release confirmed it was indeed "flipped".
Why did all these errors benefit Biden and recounts yielded Trump votes that had not initially been counted? We can expect that with such changes in only a handful of counties, there could be other errors in more of the state's 159 counties - enough to further decrease Biden's "lead" and perhaps flip Georgia for Trump. There is a pattern with several electoral races this year. A recount in an executive council district in Merrimack, New Hampshire found 1,600 extra votes that went to Republican candidate David Wheeler over Democratic councilor Debora Pignatelli. This was a 5% change that ultimately did not alter the outcome, but similar changes would likely alter results in states where Biden's "lead" over Trump was less than 1%. On November 16th, a commissioner race in Clark County, Nevada was thrown out - involving over 153,000 votes - due to discrepancies on thousands of ballots, although officials allowed the presidential race totals to remain on the same ballots. In Arizona, State Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Eddie Farnsworth ordered the seizure of Dominion machines in Maricopa County for a forensic audit after several reports of fraud.
The State of Michigan uses Dominion machines in 47 out of its 83 counties. A software glitch overturned the results of an Oakland County commissioner race in Rochester Hills, changing a 1,127-vote win for Democrat Dr. Melanie Hartman into a 104-vote loss that benefited her Republican opponent, Adam Kochenderfer. Another glitch in Antrim County found over 6,000 votes for Trump that had initially been counted for Biden, as the Detroit Free Press and other local media reported. After refusals by the state's Democratic election officials, a judge ordered the release of a Dec. 13th report that examined the Antrim County vote tabulators. Entitled "Antrim Michigan Forensics Report", it was authored by Russell James Ramsland, Jr., a Dallas, Texas-based cybersecurity analyst with decades of experience for such institutions as NASA and MIT. As a manager of Allied Security Operations Group, LLC, his report concluded:
"The purpose of this forensic audit is to test the integrity of Dominion Voting System in how it performed in Antrim County, Michigan for the 2020 election. We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified."
Smartmatic chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is an aristocrat who has held many positions with the United Nations: High Commissioner for Refugees (1979-1983), World Bank development specialist (1994-1999), UN Development Programme administrator (1999-2005), and UN Deputy Secretary-General (April-Dec. 2006). While on UN assignments in New York, Malloch-Brown rented an apartment owned by Soros and the two worked closely on joint projects. In May 2007, Soros appointed him vice-president of Quantum Fund and vice-chairman of Soros Fund Management and Open Society Institute. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of International Crisis Group. Scytl, a competitor of Dominion and Smartmatic, is an election software company headquartered in Barcelona with its own history of involvement with elections worldwide.
Given Soros' connections with Catalan separatists I documented in 2017, I have to wonder if Scytl software manipulates elections as part of the global "Color Revolutions" championed by Open Society. Malloch-Brown's meddling in Philippines elections led the Filipino non-profit IBON Foundation to criticize him as "a foreigner who made a career out of influencing elections". We Americans now know only too well about these corporations manipulating elections, and can point to the connections Smartmatic and Dominion have exactly with those Deep State forces who have long dominated the intelligence and foreign policy establishment - and meddled in other countries' affairs. Now they are working in collusion with the Communist regimes of China and Venezuela (whose own subversion in Spain I also exposed in 2017) in a joint effort involving election technology corporations founded and staffed by individuals with a myriad of Globalist connections.
In 2014, Mugica and Malloch-Brown launched SGO Corporation Limited as a holding company for Smartmatic, perhaps to shield that company from scrutiny by hiding under a different corporate name. SGO's current director is Nigel Knowles, a former CEO of the law firm DLA Piper. This happens to be the same law firm which Kamala Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, joined as a partner in 2017 and just recently left to take up his future anointing. The chairman of Smartmatic's Board of Directors is former U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Peter Neffenger. Former TSA Administrator under Obama, Neffenger was named a volunteer member of Joe Biden's Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Given similar collusion of the DHS's first head, Michael Chertoff, with the Israeli Unit 8200-linked firm Carbyne, Neffenger's ties to Venezuelan and Chinese Communist oligarchs sets the tone for a Biden DHS as it joins efforts to oversee the greatest transfer of wealth in history using the Rona as its excuse - and the 2020 election was the crucial stepping stone.
Dominion hired lobbying firm Brownstein Farber Hyatt & Schreck, one of whose lobbyists since April 2019 is Nadeam Elshami, former chief of staff of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Elshami is listed on the firm's website. Dominion's communication manager, Penelope Chester Starr, previously worked for the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and was Vice-President of Teneo, a firm that helped manage the Clintons' foreign business interests and booked their speaking engagements. After Trump's inauguration in 2017, she co-organized the Canadian Women's March in solidarity with the march in Washington, D.C. The Clinton Foundation touts its direct links to Dominion via the Delian Project: "In 2014, Dominion Voting committed to providing emerging and post-conflict democracies with access to voting technology through its philanthropic support to the DELIAN Project, as many emerging democracies suffer from post-electoral violence due to the delay in the publishing of election of results. Over the next three years, Dominion Voting will support election technology pilots with donated Automated Voting Machines (AVM), providing an improved electoral process, and therefore safer elections."
On July 16, 2018, Dominion was acquired by Staple Street Capital, a New York investment firm whose top three executives have worked for the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm whose investors and advisors have included Soros, various heads of banking houses, Clinton and Bush Administration officials, Bilderberg Steering Committee members, Saudi Prince Al-Walid, and a former deputy director of the CIA. Stephen D. Owens, William E. Kennard, and Hootan Yaghoobzadeh left Carlyle to establish Staple Street in 2009. An associate of John Kerry and the Clintons, Kennard served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under Clinton before joining Carlyle, and later served as Obama's EU Ambassador. He was also a former DLA Piper partner. Epitomizing the revolving door between corporations and government, on Nov. 7, 2020 he was named Chairman of the Board of AT&T, the telecommunications giant with media holdings as the parent company of WarnerMedia.
Since its establishment, Staple Street Capital has only received two outside investments, both from the Chinese investment bank UBS Securities according to SEC filings. On October 8, 2020, Staple Street sold $400 million worth of securities to UBS. Around this same time, Staple Street scrubbed its LinkedIn and deleted many photos from its website. What are we to make of these suspicious moves less than a month before the election? As with other Chinese "private" corporations, UBS is owned by oligarchs closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party. Dominion software has many components made in Chinese factories, including the LCD screen components and chip capacitors, so its not out of the realm of possibility there was a backdoor manipulation built into the technology. One of Dominion's subdomain, "dominionvotingSYSTEMS.com", leads to a data center in Quanzho, China. Another subdomain was traced to PowerLine Data Center in Hong Kong, whose website has simplified Chinese characters rather than the traditional ones used in Hong Kong.
Given the direct connections leading executives of Smartmatic and Dominion have with the political establishment in general and the Biden team in particular; the recent and ongoing news about an extensive compromise of many U.S. politicians by Chinese spies; and the stunning admissions by Chinese Professor Di Dongsheng about ties between Wall Street investment banks and the Chinese Communist regime, we can clearly see who would be the beneficiary from the election to such an extent they would actively manipulate the results in its favor. It speaks volumes about the collusion between the Establishment of the corporatist Duopoly Party, Wall Street and international banks, and the Communist regimes of China and Venezuela. And obviously, they see any grassroots swelling of nationalist-populist sentiment among millions of Americans as a threat to their interests. Public opinion is to be manufactured by these elites, and "embarrassing" opinions that would harm their own business and power interests are to be "corrected" by the ballot machines.
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