After months of rumors of a link between the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems and the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a flurry of stories during the past few days revealed that the U.S. government has begun an investigation of the purchasing company, Smartmatic, which has been linked to the leftist government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
An American Congresswoman called into question the national security implications involved in the sale of an American election services company last year by its British owner (the company which prints the Queen’s currency) to a Venezuelan software firm owned by a trust in Amsterdam which is itself owned by an entity in the Netherlands Antilles whose ownership resides in a private foundation in Geneva, Switzerland.
This is pretty much business as usual in America’s hugely compromised election industry, a fact has somehow completely escaped mainstream media scrutiny until now, and would no doubt continue to do so,
but for the dread specter of Venezuelan leftist Hugo Chavez.
An investigation into corruption in the election services companies which count America’s votes is so long overdue that American voters owe a debt of gratitude, and at least a pair of tickets to next year’s World Series, to the Venezuelan leftist firebrand.
“The government should know who owns our voting machines,” stated Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review the takeover of Sequoia Voting Systems, an industry leader which counts one of every three American votes.
A Supreme Court Justice wearing a wire
If there is a “cover-up” involved in the current ownership of Sequoia, it wouldn’t be the first time, and would come as no surprise. The very word “cover-up” itself was first coined in a scandal in 1969 involving the then-owner of Sequoia, a convicted felon named Louis Wolfson.
Abe Fortas, the only Supreme Court Justice forced to resign in disgrace, took bribes from the then-owner (in 1969) of Sequoia, Louis Wolfson, a convicted securities manipulator.
New York Times wordsmith extraordinaire William Safire is credited with discovering that the origin of the word comes from a recorded conversation between Fortas and Wolfson, making Fortas the only U.S. Supreme Court Justice who has ever worn a wire to work off a “beef,” as they say in criminal parlance.
Safire was, back then, one of the few top Nixon aides to emerge after Watergate with his
reputation intact, and later popularized the adage: "The cover-up is always worse than the crime."
“There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of the company,” Rep. Maloney said of Smartmatic, the Venezuelan firm which swallowed the venerable Sequoia Voting Systems, the oldest American election company, founded in 1898 in Jamestown, New York.
Yet another fiendishly-shrewd Republican plot?
Indeed, the deliberately tangled and murky ownership of Sequoia Voting Systems seems to clearly indicate that someone is relying on the idea that somewhere in that obscure chain of command lurks the Blessed Sacrament of Plausible Deniability.
But the idea that Karl Rove would allow a company to be sold to one of George W. Bush’s most bitter rivals which can, with just a few keystrokes, change the popular will for four years at a crack without anyone being the wiser is errant nonsense.
On the contrary, the sale of Sequoia to an offshore company suspected of links to Hugo Chavez may be a key element in a fiendishly-shrewd Republican strategy to disclaim responsibility after the fact for stealing the 2006 vote.
Consider: who would suspect Republicans of being responsible if a company linked to Hugo Chavez is shown to have been “massaging” the vote?
No one, that's who.
A slight conflict of interest never hurt nobody.
But there is actually a Chavez whose involvement we should be worried about.
But his first name isn’t Hugo. It’s Manny. And he doesn’t live in Caracas…
He lives in Austin Texas.
While the controversy swirling around Sequoia Voting Systems has so far only been about its takeover by Smartmatic, that may be about to change.
It may seem obvious, but election machines consist of both hardware, the machines themselves, and software, which tells the machine what to do.
The MadCowMorningNews has learned that Sequoia Voting Systems’ electronic voting machines are being manufactured by a U.S. defense contractor which has contracts producing parts for the Boeing V-22 Osprey, as well as components for military Chinook, Hawkeye, Osprey and Comanche helicopters.
The company, Harvard Custom Manufacturing, in Salisbury MD, was until recently owned by Manny Chavez of Austin Texas.
“The electronics manufacturing company's (Harvard Custom Manufacturing) PCBA Systems Division, in Owego, produces electronic voting machines for Sequoia Pacific,” reported the Elmira, New York Star-Gazette in a February 22, 2004 business feature headlined “Companies to watch.”
Tilt-rotor Ospreys and election machines
"Because of what happened in Florida in 2000, that business really has the potential to grow," said Doug Barton, interim director of the Tioga County Department of Economic Development and Planning.
Harvard has contracts “with the Seattle-based Boeing aerospace manufacturer to produce parts for the relatively new Boeing V-22 Osprey, a tilt rotor military aircraft used by the U.S. Marine Corps that a company official says "flies like a plane and lands like a helicopter,” reports the Salisbury MD. Daily Times on October 6, 2006.
“Harvard's facility in Salisbury (also) provides most of the cables and electronic wiring harnesses for the fleet of Chinook helicopters now used overseas. Harvard workers also provide full aircraft complements for the Hawkeye, Osprey and Comanche helicopters,” states the article.
Minority Business Entrepreneur (MBE) on April 30, 2001 reported, “Becoming a Texas tycoon used to mean striking oil in the Lone Star state. However, the "black gold" in Texas today isn't necessarily oil. It's technology. That's why some of today's Texas-born cowboys like Manny Chavez are riding around town wearing a different hat.”
Manny Chavez is “the sole owner of one of Austin's fastest growing private companies,” reported the Sept 22, 2000 Austin Business Journal.
Capt. Renaud cashes in his chips
While Rep. Maloney’s efforts are laudable, any outrage over the current state of affairs is a little like that scene in the movie Casablanca where Humphrey Bogart’s nightclub gets raided, and, while pocketing his winnings, the French police captain says, “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
American voters this year appear alert as never before to what used to be derided as “conspiracy theory:” the idea that American elections may not be as open and honest as we would all like to believe them to be.
One of this nation’s Big Dirty Secrets is that the companies responsible for counting America’s votes have been convicted of the felonious suborning of American democracy so many times that if they were people, instead of corporations they would have been sent away for 
life long ago under the “three strikes law.”
Because, sad to say, it isn’t IBM technicians in white lab coats who oversee the casting and counting of America’s vote. The election service industry has long been dominated by shadowy financiers with ties to the oil, defense, and even the intelligence industry.
And the companies are run, like as not, by individuals who would feel right at home on an episode of The Soprano’s. Nor is this an exaggeration…
The major media must have been sick that day
Until his felony conviction for bribing the elections commissioner of the state of Louisiana for a period of over ten years, the Southeast Regional Manager for Sequoia Voting Systems was one Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci, a resident of Marlton, New Jersey.
After Ricci’s conviction in early 2001 for suborning democracy in Louisiana for over a decade, we asked the-then U.S. Attorney in Baton Rouge who had convicted him, Terry Hymel, if Ricci was, as rumored, a “member” of organized crime.
His embarrassed and somewhat angry response was: “I don’t know.”
We didn’t mention it (because we were obviously already pressing our luck) but he’d had over a decade to look it up.
In the endless news coverage of the aftermath of the 2000 Presidential Election, the news somehow failed to surface that Sequoia Pacific, as Sequoia Voting Systems used to be known, has a felony 'rap sheet' an arm-long.
In fact, executives and managers from the largest American election service companies have been convicted of bribery and suborning public officials in more than a dozen states, a MadCowMorningNews investigation has revealed.
So while a felony conviction may be enough to keep you from voting in places like Florida, convicted felons can take heart; a felony “blemish” in no way disqualifies you from counting the votes.
Imagine that.
