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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.
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