Maybe Sidney Powell was not so crazy after all?

Hugo Chavez was Involved With U.S. Voting Machines

Insider’s affidavit is first evidence of suspected foreign election fraud in US

J. Michael Waller

November 21, 2020

An affidavit from a former confidant of the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez provides evidence that Smartmatic election tabulation software was created by the regime and exported internationally to manipulate voting results.

This is the first piece of evidence to surface in President Trump’s legal fight to protect the American voting system from corruption and foreign subversion. Trump campaign counsel Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, read from the affidavit in a 90-minute news conference on November 19.

The affidavit, with names redacted to protect the identities of the witnesses and others, describes how the Cuban- and Russian-backed leader of Venezuela personally set the parameters for vote-fraud software. He first wanted it to give himself dictatorial powers through guaranteed election fraud, and then to elect allies throughout the American hemisphere.

Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, first revealed the document.

The witness explains that the Smartmatic software works in Dominion ballot machines and is the “DNA” of all major vote-counting software, including technology used in the 2020 United States elections. At first look, it appears as if the software could be part of a Cuban-backed political warfare operation.

Summary of the evidence

• Source was a top-level Hugo Chavez insider. The eyewitness was a member of Hugo Chavez’s presidential guard and a Venezuelan military special operations officer who received advanced military education.

• Operation began more than a decade ago. The witness says that the operation, or criminal conspiracy, began more than a decade ago “to wrongfully gain and keep power and wealth” in Venezuela and in other countries in the hemisphere.

• Personal witness to the development & operation of the software. “I was witness to the creation and operation of a sophisticated electronic voting system that permitted the leaders of the Venezuelan government to manipulate the tabulation of votes for national and local elections and select the winner of those elections to gain and maintain their power,” the witness says.

• Directly witnessed Smartmatic’s collusion with the regime leadership. “I was a direct witness to the creation and operation of an electronic voting system in a conspiracy between a company known as Smartmatic and the leaders of conspiracy with the Venezuelan government. This conspiracy directly involved President Hugo Chavez Frias, the person in charge of the National Electoral Council named Jorge Rodriguez, and principals, representatives, and personnel from Smartmatic, which included [name/s redacted]. The purpose of this conspiracy was to create and operate a voting system that could change the votes in elections from votes against persons running the Venezuelan government to votes in their favor in order to maintain control of the government.”

• Smartmatic system was used to change the constitution. The system was used in a 2009 referendum to change the Venezuelan constitution to end term limits, including for Hugo Chavez. “The referendum passed.”

• Witness had hands-on experience. The affidavit says that Chavez had the witness handle details directly of the Smartmatic operation.

• Smartmatic had repeated meetings with Chavez. “After passage of the referendum, President Chavez instructed me to make arrangements for him to meet Jorge Rodriguez, then President of the National Electoral Council, and three representatives from Smartmatic. Among the three Smartmatic representatives were [names redacted]. President Chavez had multiple meetings with Rodriguez and the Smartmatic team at which I was present.”

• Chavez’s electoral chief had the software idea. “In the first four meetings, Jorge Rodriguez promoted the idea to create software that would manipulate elections.”

• Chavez wanted Smartmatic to build the election manipulation system. “Chavez was very excited and made it clear that he would provide whatever Smartmatic needed. He wanted them immediately to create a voting system which would ensure that any time anything was going to be voted on the voting system would guarantee results that Chavez wanted. Chavez offered Smartmatic many inducements, including large sums of money, for Smartmatic to create or modify the voting system so that it would guarantee Chavez would win every election cycle. Smartmatic’s team agreed to create such a system and did so.”

• Witness has details on how Smartmatic fraud software works. The witness details more meetings and details, including names. The system was used to keep Chavez in power “democratically,” and to rig voting at the national and local levels. The system was designed to foil the biometric identity of each voter and not assign that biometric to the real ballot, and would leave no evidence that the vote had been changed or otherwise manipulated.

• Witness worked Smartmatic in ‘several’ elections. The witness personally was involved with “several” Venezuelan elections, including in 2006 and 2013.

• False vote returns were fed directly into Internet and news media. Smartmatic fed the false voting tabulations directly onto the Internet and to the news media.

• Operatives moved anti-Chavez votes to Chavez via Smartmatic. “Persons controlling the vote tabulation computer had the ability to change the reporting of votes by moving votes from one candidate to another by using the Smartmatic software.”

• Chavez opponent was 2 million votes ahead; system ‘reset’ made Chavez win. By 2:00 PM during the 2013 election, Chavez’s opponent was ahead by 2 million votes, so the decision was made to “reset the entire system” and “take the internet itself offline in practically all parts of Venezuela and to change the results.” [There were 19 million registered voters in Venezuela at the time.]

• The vote-changing took two hours, state-by-state. It took about two hours to change the voting to ensure that Maduro would win. The controllers checked the numbers in every Venezuelan state, inspected the changes, and had Maduro win narrowly by 200,000 votes.

• Smartmatic exports its software for rigging votes across the Americas. Smartmatic began exporting its system to other countries in Latin America for fraudulent voting purposes to elect or prop up politicians supportive of Hugo Chavez [and by extension, Cuba].

• ‘Smartmatic software is the DNA of every vote tabulating’ technology. “… the software and fundamental design of the electronic electoral system and software of Dominion and other election tabulating companies relies upon software that is a descendant of the Smartmatic Electoral Management System. In short, the Smartmatic software is the DNA of every vote tabulating company’s software and system.”

• Dominion uses same methods & software design in USA. In the United States, “Dominion uses the same methods and fundamentally same software design for the storage, transfer, and computation of voter identification data and voting data.”

• Witnessed the real-time vote-changing firsthand. “I saw first-hand that the manipulation and changing of votes can be done in real-time at the secret counting center….”

• The software operator decides the votes – ‘not the voter.’ “… it doesn’t matter what the voter decides or what the paper ballot says. It’s the software operator that decides what counts – not the voter.”

• Smartmatic’s fraud went public in 2017. The Smartmatic fraud was made public in Venezuela in 2017. [One asks, where were the CIA and FBI in missing open-source revelations about a voting system used in the United States? The FBI official responsible for protecting the country from such an operation at the time was counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok.]

• 2020: Five states using Dominion equipment stopped vote counting, then the votes flipped. “What happened in the United States was that the vote counting was abruptly stopped in five states using Dominion software. At the time that vote counting was stopped, Donald Trump was significantly ahead in the votes. Then during the wee hours of the morning, when there was no voting occurring and the vote count reporting was off-line, something significantly changed. When the vote reporting resumed the very next morning there was a very pronounced change in voting in favor of the opposing candidate, Joe Biden.”

• More sources have been developed. The witness says he has developed other sources among his former colleagues, apparently indicating that they can substantiate and/or add to his testimony.

A copy of the affidavit, redacted for the court, can be downloaded here. (PDF made from images published by Byron York.)

From 2006

Why is Hugo Chavez Involved With U.S. Voting Machines?

By Richard Brand

The greater threat to our nation's security comes not from Dubai and its pro-Western government, but from Venezuela, where software engineers with links to the leftist, anti-American regime of Hugo Chavez are programming electronic voting machines that will soon power U.S. elections.

Congress spent two weeks overreacting to news that Dubai Ports World would operate several American ports, including Miami's, but a better target for their hysteria would be the acquisition by Smartmatic International of California-based Sequoia Voting Systems, whose machines serve millions of U.S. voters. That Smartmatic -- which has been accused by Venezuela's opposition of helping Ch�vez rig elections in his favor -- now controls a major U.S. e-voting firm should give pause to anybody who thinks that replacing our antiquated butterfly ballots and hanging chads will restore Americans' faith in our electoral process.

Consider the lack of confidence Venezuelans have in their voting system. Anti-Chavez groups have such little faith in Smartmatic's machines that they refuse to run candidates in elections anymore as reports surface of fraud and irregularities from Chavez's 2004 victory in a recall referendum. Yet somehow Smartmatic International and its Venezuelan owners were able to purchase Sequoia last year without the deal receiving any scrutiny from federal regulators -- including the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), which is tasked with determining whether foreign takeovers pose security risks.

CFIUS generally investigates such transactions only when the parties voluntarily submit themselves to review -- which Smartmatic did not do. But it retains the authority to initiate an investigation when it suspects a takeover compromises national security.

Smartmatic has a brief but controversial history. The company was started in Caracas during the late 1990s by engineers Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola. They worked out of downtown Caracas providing small-scale technology services to Latin American banks. Despite having no election experience, the tiny company rocketed from obscurity in 2004 after it was awarded a $100 million contract by the Chavez-dominated National Electoral Council to replace Venezuela's electronic voting machines for the recall vote.

When the council announced the deal, it disingenuously described Smartmatic as a Florida company, though Smartmatic's main operations were in Caracas and the firm had incorporated only a small office in Boca Raton. It then emerged that Smartmatic's ''partner'' in the deal, Bizta Corp., also directed by Anzola and Mugica, was partly owned by the Venezuelan government through a series of intermediary shell corporations. Venezuela initially denied its investment but eventually sold its stake.

When the vote finally came, exit polls by New York's Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates showed Chavez had been defeated 59 to 41 percent; however, when official tallies were announced, the numbers flipped to 58-42 in favor of Chavez. Venezuela's electoral council briefly posted machine-by-machine tallies on the Internet but removed them as mathematicians from MIT, Harvard and other universities began questioning suspicious patterns in the results.

Flush with cash from its Venezuelan adventures, Smartmatic International incorporated in Delaware last year and purchased Sequoia, announcing the deal as a merger between two U.S. companies.

Smartmatic says the recall vote was clean and that it is independent of the Chavez government. Responding to my inquiries, Smartmatic-Sequoias sent a written statement: ``Sequoia's products consist only of voting devices and systems, all of which must be federally and state tested and certified prior to use in an election. As Sequoia's products do not have military, defense or national security applications, they do not fall within the parameters of the matters governed by CFIUS.''

In fact, Smartmatic International is owned by a Netherlands corporation, which is in turn owned by a Curacao corporation, which is in turn held by a number of Curacao trusts controlled by proxy holders who represent unnamed investors, almost certainly among them Venezuelans Mugica and Anzola and possibly others.

Why Smartmatic has chosen yet again to abuse the corporate form apparently to conceal the nationality and identity of its true owners is a question that should worry anyone who votes using one of its machines. Congress panicked upon hearing that our ports would be run by an American ally, Dubai, but never asked whether America's actual enemies in Venezuela have been able to acquire influence in our electoral process.

Richard Brand is a second-year law student at New York University and a former staff writer for The Miami Herald. Email: rmb381@nyu.edu

Historical interview about how the Magic Electronic Voting Machine company that we used in our elections was bought and owned by President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez back in the early 2000s.

The person to certify the voting machines was none other than Jimmy Carter

From Wikieaks cables

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06CARACAS2063_a.html?s=09