by WorldTribune Staff, August 9, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
A federal grand jury in south Florida has indicted the president of voting machine company Smartmatic on bribery and money-laundering charges.
Roger Pinate, along with alleged co-conspirators Jorge Miguel Vasquez, and Elie Moreno, have been accused of giving former chairman of the Philippines’ Commission on Elections Juan Andres Donato Bautista $1 million in bribes to secure election contracts in the Philippines.
“These bribes were allegedly paid to obtain and retain business related to providing voting machines and election services for the 2016 Philippine elections and to secure payments on the contracts, including the release of value added tax payments,” the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.
Questions about who and what are behind Smartmatic’s meteoric and global expansion in this century and what are its ties to Dominion Voting Systems have yet to be definitely answered.
Computerized and Internet-connected election and vote tabulation systems are now widely used worldwide and throughout the United States.
In a November 2020 report, the National Pulse said court documents it had analyzed reveal Smartmatic and Dominion have a “noncompetition” agreement.
Support American Journalism
According to the summary of law firm Potter Anderson Corroon, in 2009, Dominion was a defendant in a lawsuit against Smartmatic: “The license agreement contained a noncompetition provision, which, among other things, prohibited Smartmatic from develop[ing], market[ing] or sell[ing] any Licensed Product in the United States.”
In other words, it would be illegal for the two firms to compete – a direct contradiction of claims by the firms as well as by media organizations.
Related: U.S. flagged concerns about Smartmatic and voting data fraud in 2006 cable from Caracas, December 2, 2020
Prosecutors said the alleged co-conspirators were able to pay the bribes by over-invoicing the cost of each voting machine in the election, and hid the payments by using coded words to refer to the accounts that contained the funds. They also created fraudulent contracts and fake loan agreements to justify the transfer of large sums.
Pinate, Moreno, Vasquez, and Bautista have all been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and three counts of international laundering of monetary instruments. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison for each charge.
Smartmatic was founded in 2000, and its voting machines have been used in elections globally including in Venezuela, the Philippines, Utah, and Los Angeles.
According to the Miami Herald, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez chose Smartmatic to replace the country’s previous machines in 2004.
In the 2016 Utah Republican caucus, where Utah Republicans voted to choose the party’s nominee for president, voters had the opportunity to vote using traditional methods or to vote online. For online voting, the Utah Republican Party used an Internet voting system developed by the Smartmatic-Cybernetica Internet Voting Centre of Excellence, based in Estonia.
Despite warnings from security experts, Utah GOP officials billed the online voting system, for which the state paid $150,000. Multiple issues occurred with the system, with voters receiving error messages and even being blocked from voting. Smartmatic received thousands of calls from Utah voters about issues with the process. The Washington Post stated that “the concern seems to be less with the technology and more with the security of the devices people use to vote”.
According to Joe Kiniry, the lead researcher of Galois, a technology research firm: “Several of us did a lightweight analysis of it remotely, to see how it was built and deployed and this sort of thing … we found that they were using technologies that even modern Web programmers stay away from. … It’s like the dumbest possible choices are being made by some of these companies with respect to deployed technology that should be mission-critical!”
Related: Elon Musk on looming 2024 issue: ‘Eliminate electronic voting machines’, June 16, 2024
In 2017, Los Angeles County signed a $282 million contract with Smartmatic to create an election system to be used for future elections which became the first publicly owned voting system in the United States.
According to Smartmatic’s website, Pinate executes “strategic efforts and daily business functions worldwide” and co-created the company’s long-term vision.
“Roger played a critical role in planning and executing the world’s largest election using optical scanners (in the Philippines) and in Smartmatic winning the largest election contract in U.S. history (in Los Angeles),” the company said.
Elon Musk has called for a complete ban on electronic voting machines, warning that they risk being hacked by bad actors.
Musk was responding to a post from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who highlighted the irregularities in Puerto Rico’s primary elections.
Kennedy wrote on X: “Puerto Rico’s primary elections just experienced hundreds of voting irregularities related to electronic voting machines, according to the Associated Press.”
Musk responded: “We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high.”
Smartmatic voting machines founder indicted; Systems used in Venezuela, Philippines, Utah, L.A. added by Editor Two on August 9, 2024
View all posts by Editor Two →
Source link