The Murky Foreign Actors Behind US Election Fraud
By F. William Engdahl
23 November 2020
Image: Dominion ImageCast precinct count optical ballot scanner Credit: Douglas W. Jones License: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication License Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dominion_ImageCast.jpg
Amid documented stories of “ordinary” US election fraud for the November 3 Presidential voting, including false ID, dead voters voting and suspicious one-sided mail in votes in key Democrat-run states, more evidence points to the role of highly sophisticated foreign actors, in concert with elements of the US deep state bad actors, making a brazen highly-illegal effort to topple President Trump and replace him with a more compliant, compromised Joe Biden, who will follow the Great Reset Agenda of the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates. At the center of this seems to be a group of murky private companies which since 2002 have come to dominate elections in not only the USA but also many other countries. If allowed to go unchallenged it will have catastrophic consequences not only inside the United States.
Today the companies which provide US voting machines and related software are dominated by three entities: Dominion Voting Systems of Toronto Canada, SGO Smartmatic of the UK, and ES&S of Omaha. Two of the three are foreign companies. That in itself is ground for concern. But it goes far deeper.
The 2002 HAVA Act
Before the 2000 US election where a thin margin of defective paper ballots, the famous “hanging chads” count, determined the election of George W. Bush, the role of computerized voting machines was very limited. In 2002 that changed, as Congress passed a law seemingly designed to end the problem with punch card ballots. Private companies have run elections since then.
On October 29, 2002, President G.W. Bush signed the “Help America Vote Act of 2002” (HAVA). The law created a new federal agency, United States Election Assistance Commission, to serve as a clearinghouse for election administration information; it created Federal funds to help states improve election administration and “replace outdated voting systems.” Finally the Act proposed to create minimum standards for states to follow in several key areas of election administration. Russell Ramsland, a cyber security expert who founded LI Security Operations, told a recent TV interviewer that the so-called minimum standards were never created. What the law did was provide funds to the states to outsource their election management to private companies like ES&S, Dominion, Smartmatic and some smaller ones. By 2018, these cyber electronic voting companies controlled 92% of the market share of US elections. No longer could bipartisan vote monitors theoretically insure election vote integrity. Computers, proprietary software and all their vulnerabilities were now in control.
Smartmatic
By 2004 several young software professionals in Caracas, Venezuela were called in by the embattled socialist regime of Hugo Chavez to help him and his Bolivarian Revolution, backed by Castro’s Cuba, to survive a referendum. The previous Christian Democratic regime of Rafael Caldera had passed a law requiring automated voting and the US voting companies ES&S and the Spanish Indra Systems had established a presence in the country. ES&S was close to the Bush Republican Party.
In response to a bid process for the 2004 Venezuela recall election by Venezuela’s CNE election authority, a new consortium known as SBC Consortium was formed and won the bid to run the referendum counting process. The SBC Consortium comprised Smartmatic (51%), Bitza software (2%), and state telecommunications organization CANTV (47%). The Chavez-appointed R&D Software head of Bitza was Omar Montilla Castillo, a Chavez Government official. Smartmatic had been founded a couple years before by two Venezuelan engineers living in Florida, Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola. The 2004 referendum was their first venture into voting machines. The pro-Chavez Floridians won the bid and were awarded $128 million, with Smartmatic retrofitting gambling machines to be used for the process. Apparently it wasn’t such a big step from rigged gambling machines to rigged voting machines for the clever Venezuelan entrepreneurs.
The Smartmatic consortium successfully falsified the referendum for Chavez. Chavez was behind 40% to 60% in polling. But in the election, Chavez pulled off a “miraculous” 52%-48% win. At the time the New York Times, then somewhat more objective than today, wrote, “Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country’s elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chávez as president in August 2004.”
Vote Fraud with a British Face
Today Antonio Mugica sits in London, where Smartmatic now oversees a global network of computer vote rigging. In 2014, Mugica, together with British Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, announced the launching of the SGO Corporation Limited, a holding company headquartered in London whose primary asset is the election technology and voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic. Mugica is CEO of SGO Smartmatic and his Venezuelan cofounder, Roger Piñate, also sits on the London board. Smartmatic today still has deep Venezuelan roots to corrupt Chavez and Maduro circles.
Mark Malloch-Brown, chairman of SGO Smartmatic is quite a key figure. As documented in excellent research by Matthew Ehret, Malloch Brown has been on the board of the Davos World Economic Forum, the prime driver behind the dystopian ‘Great Reset’ agenda of UN Global 2030. He has been also a board member of George Soros Open Society Foundations and Soros Quantum Fund. Soros is a major funder of Democratic Party candidates and groups, including BLM. Malloch Brown was a Deputy Secretary General of the UN under corrupt Kofi Annan and was Vice President of the World Bank. The Labour Party member is also a member of the highly secret Privy Council, an elite of some 500+ people selected by the Queen to run affairs of state. In 2008 just after the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, Obama’s UN Ambassador-to-be, Samantha Power, noted that, “The principal conduit between Britain and the Candidate [Obama] has been Lord Malloch Brown, the Junior Foreign Minister…” This is the person today heading the highly controversial voting systems group, Smartmatic.
Another board member of SGO Smartmatic in London is DLA Piper global CEO, Sir Nigel Knowles. DLA Piper was then the world’s largest law firm in 2014. Notably, Douglas C. Emhoff, husband to Kamala Harris, is a partner at DLA Piper. Perhaps just coincidence?
It gets more biased. In the United States Smartmatic has a four person Board. The Smartmatic USA chairman is Peter Neffenger, who has just been named to Joe Biden’s Transition Team. Neffenger was in the Obama Administration as TSA head. Fellow Smartmatic USA board member, Paul DeGregorio, was Chairman of the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) from 2003-2007. EAC was created by the 2002 Help America Vote Act and is responsible for “administering payments to states and developing guidance to meet HAVA requirements, adopting voluntary voting system guidelines, and accrediting voting system test laboratories and certifying voting equipment.” Sitting also with Neffenger and DeGregorio at the USA Smartmatic board is Gracia Hillman who also served as Chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission from 2003 to 2010 under Obama. Their website declares, “Smartmatic is the global leader in secure, accessible, transparent election technology & support services. We believe in equality and justice for all.”
To underscore what can only be termed extraordinary bias, two of four board members of Smartmatic USA were head of the US Government agency delegated to develop guidelines for voting systems and two were Obama Democrat appointees, one now a Biden adviser. That is OK for election integrity, or?
Sequoia Voting Systems—the Bridge Too Far
A company called Sequoia Voting Systems, founded in California, was a key link between the software and systems of Smartmatic and the other giant voting company implicated in huge USA 2020 vote fraud, Dominion Voting Systems of Canada. In March 2005 Smartmatic bought the California Sequoia Voting Systems from its then-owner, De La Rue, a British currency paper printing and security company. Smartmatic assigned a major portion of its development teams, to revamping Sequoia’s old-fashioned, legacy voting machines, and replacing their technology with avant-garde proprietary features and developments, which resulted in new, high-tech products.
The merged Smartmatic-Sequoia company was flourishing in the US market until a US Treasury investigation of Smartmatic’s possible ties to a foreign government, Venezuela, forced Smartmatic to sell Sequoia. They did so in an allegedly deceptive sale to Smartmatic US managers who were US citizens, under terms not made public, as SVS Inc., allowing the US Government to drop the investigation. But Sequoia, now called SVS Inc. of the USA, was still controlled by the Venezuelan-origin Smartmatics. Smartmatic retained ownership of intellectual property rights for Sequoia’s currently deployed election products in the United States.
In 2007 Princeton Professor of Computer Science, Andrew Appel, testified as an expert in a legal case in New Jersey involving the Sequoia Advantage voting machines that it was “very easy to replace the software inside a computerized machine so it tells the voter it is voting for one candidate but really puts the vote in the wrong column…You can even program it to do that only on election day.”
In the same year 2007, the California Secretary of State decertified Sequoia voting machines in the state election, declaring that the Sequoia voting machines allow the “insertion of a Trojan program via a malicious USB removable storage media device that could modify ballot definitions and results.” The ruling added that Sequoia voting machines could be made to “shift votes from one candidate to another and [the shift] was not detectable on the voter verifiable paper audit trail.” These are the same tricks of fraud being challenged by the Trump legal teams.
Next, this fraud-ridden Smartmatic-controlled Sequoia Voting Systems, aka SVS Inc., was bought on June 4, 2010 by a previously obscure Canadian company, Dominion Voting Systems, a company engaged in manufacturing electronic voting hardware and optical scanners.
Dominion Voting Systems
At the time Dominion of Canada bought Sequoia SVS Inc, the latter had contracts for 300 in 16 states. Suddenly Dominion, via Sequoia via Smartmatic of London, was a major player in the increasingly corrupt business of computerized voting in the USA. In short, Smartmatic bought US-based Sequoia, put its technology into Sequoia, and the jurisdictions n sold it to Dominion.
However, further insuring that the Canadian Dominion would remain opaque to scrutiny, in 2018 the company was taken over as a private company by its employees together with an opaque private equity firm, Staple Street Capital of New York, allowing them to claim being a “US-owned” company, despite its headquarters in Canada. What little that is known about Staple Street, the new owners of Dominion is that several came from the controversial private equity giant, Carlyle Group Partners. William Kennard, former Obama appointee as EU Ambassador and Bill Clinton appointee as FCC chairman and former Managing Director of the Carlyle Group is in Staple Street Capital.
Hootan Yaghoobzadeh and Stephen D. Owens, both of Staple Street, are on the new Dominion board with Canadian founder, John Poulos. Both also have past ties to the Carlyle Group. The contested State of Georgia has eight registered Dominion lobbyists including Jared Thomas, former chief of staff for Republican Governor Brian Kemp. The Georgia recount had been riddled with bipartisan corruption. Additionally, the Dominion Voting Systems company has admitted being a past donor to the Clinton Foundation and to hiring the former Chief of Staff of Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one Nadeam Elshami as a lobbyist.
In 2016 Dominion Vice President Dr. Eric Coomer was asked if it was possible to bypass election systems software and go directly to the data tables that manage systems running elections in Illinois. He replied, “Yes, if they have access.” Asked who that included, he replied, “Vendors, election officials, and others who need to be granted access.” The same Coomer in 2020 was discovered posting Facebook posts favorable to BLM and attacking Trump.
In the 2020 election Dominion was responsible for some 50% of all votes in 30 states and was dominating in every state where the outcome is being contested by the Trump legal teams, namely in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia. The contested states all swung to Democrat Biden from initial huge leads for Trump. In dozens of voting districts across those states using Dominion systems, the vote tally produced statistically impossible voter statistics, such as 100% or 105% voter turnout or even higher. That would even make Kim Jong-Un envious.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”