Venezuelan E-voting Owner Denied Entry U.S. (but still counts USvote)

[Land Shark]

A man with the rare privilege of counting American votes on trade secret computer hard drives was denied entry into the United States on October 14 by the United States State Department. Apparently, Antonio Mujico of Sequoia Voting Systems' parent company Smartmatic was considered by the U.S. embassy in Venezuela to be unfit for entry into the U.S. even for a limited stay as a tourist. He left in a huff.

Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the big three voting technology companies in the US, was previously owned by de La Rue (an English multinational) but was recently purchased for $16 million by Smartmatic, which is wholly owned at least on paper by Venezuelan nationals. Smartmatic has been embroiled in some controversy in Venezuela as well (its only major client prior to entering the US market) as Hugo Chavez won election under disputed circumstances.

Votersunite.org, who released this story through VoteTrustUSA, notes that "The irony of this situation shows how irrational the administration of elections in the U.S. has become. While U.S. law allows this Venezuelan man to control the secret counting of Americans’ votes, the U.S. State Department doesn’t consider him fit to enter the country, even temporarily.”

The press release, and link to the original Venezuelan article, are at
<http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=199&Itemid=50>

Thanks also to www.bradblog.com for covering this, via guest blogger John Gideon of Votersunite.org

In fact, the issue goes much further than a "security" issue regarding elections. It is the denial of the public's right to verify that it actually has a democracy and not just smoke and mirrors. Moreover, the right to count votes in secret is, at the very least, a valuable privilege and honor that ought (if it is to be given away at all) to be sold to the highest bidder. After all, if we are going to sell out our democracy, shouldn't we get a good price for it? Government "servants" signing e-voting contracts could at least protect the public coffers even if election checks and balances like transparency and accountability are, in their opinion, no longer tenable.

[kster]

1. Kick-n-recommended.nt

[Land Shark]

2. Gracias, kster, I was thinking/hoping this one might catch some views...

[ellenfl]

3. will we have to dump sequoia voting machines now? please? eom

[Land Shark]

4. With Sugar on top of that one!! : ) n/t

[1932]

5. The Smartmatic machines they used in Venezuela had paper trail.

[Land Shark]

6. paper trails on top of DRE touch screens are expensive band aids

that some studies suggest don't work (MIT/Caltech say only 8% of errors actually caught) while other studies suggest that they might.

Why mess around with democracy and create huge lines for elections by creating expensive machine-bottlenecks? our DREs in my home county were among the first in the nation and we're getting rid of them. $5M serves 32% of the voting population, while 68% vote on paper and/or by mail.

The voting machines first hijack democracy and allow secret vote counting, then earnest activists work tirelessly for a bandaid that doesn't address the truly revolutionary and anti-democratic nature of the technology.

there are important details about whether the paper trail is just an 'audit device" or the "ballot of record" (in which case DREs are just expensive printers) but the bottleneck reality remains, along with a varying array of other problems

[Land Shark]

7. please drop by Election Reform forum for more discussion

[Land Shark]

8. Whatever you may think about Venezuela's elections, they had 10 hour lines

to vote in many places (the problem with all expensive technologies in contested elections)

[Melissa G]

9. K and N for Landshark!

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. Ironic

don't the repukes realize that those who count the votes may ahem take away their victories?

Ironic....

And no, not making light of this at all... just find it ironic

[Land Shark]

11. Part of the overall takeover via privatization

at the heart of democracy
at the heart of elections
lies a piece of corporate property, called trade secret software
that decides democracies greatest questions

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Why do you think I am pusshing for OPEN SOURCE

LINUX if they insist on electronic?

[autorank]

12. Great stuff!!!!! A new variation in "oursourcing" elections. Recommend!

Well, here's a question.

What happens if, right before 2005, Chavez nationalizes Smartmatic (sic)?

Seriously, :wtf: would we do? He'd have access to code, operations, design, everything.

Would the Republicans cause a fuss?

Will the Republicans blame Smartmatic if the Democrats win?

And, my favorite, what will the DNC brain trust say?

This one is loaded for bear.

[GuvWurld]

13. Just when you thought it couldn't get any stupider

In the comedy of life, U.S. elections should be filed under Camp. How can anyone take this seriously anymore?

[autorank]

51. ;) Elections in drag..something in a faux democracy Mr & Mrs. J.Q. Public

They'll take it seriously until they know the truth. Many do, they just need a national vibration or, better yet, earthquake, to let them know, without a doubt, that the elections have been/are/will be a fraud until we adopt real democracy, not that dictated by the the mediocrities who mindlessly buy voting machines and tabulators.

[EFerrari]

15. Tan muchas gracias, Landshark.

I'm trying to get over the irony of the Venezuela location, to the heart of the voting issue. Is that your take? That this particular locale is coincidental?

You're point that we have no reason to trust the election results presented to us remains, to my mind, the clearest argument for election reform.

Before I trouble you with questions, I think I just need to read this forum every day for a while -- which I have not been able to do.

Venezuela. Muy interesante. If you get your hands on Spanish language docs that need translating, let me know.

Beth

[eridani]

16. Venezuela ought to go back to paper ballots also, IMO

The technology is inherently anti-democratic.

[1932]

19. Venezuela wanted instant counting because they feared that

with slow counting, counters who took sides, once they saw a trend, would make boxes of ballots disappear before they got countred.

So the solution was this company's machines which were basically counters that printed out a paper ballot. The voter looked at the ballot and OK'd it. If OK'd it dropped into a locked box and was counted. If not OK'd it dropped into a shredder. When the polls closed, the machines dial in the totals and the entire country is counted and added up instantly. The paper ballots are available for auditing.

[Wilms]

17. .

[nashville_brook]

18. powerful stuff!

It is the denial of the public's right to verify that it actually has a democracy and not just smoke and mirrors.

how many more elections will be stolen before we get our country back?

[NobleCynic]

20. To steal an election is simplicity

To convince everyone that it wasn't actually stolen is beauty. There is a certain sick beauty in how Machiavellian the neo-cons are in stealing our democracy.

[rman]

21. Chavez election NOT disputed by election monitors (Jimmy Carter),

only disputed by opposition parties.

Carter vow on Chavez election
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=682&id=960002004

Isn't it funny that you never hear about the 2000 and '04 US elections being "disputed".

The 2000 US election is in fact disputed by Carter.
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Carter_says_Gore_won_2000_el_0922.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52800-2004Sep26.html

[Land Shark]

22. Carter has lost a lot of credibility on ELECTRONIC elections

doesn't appear they fully understand them. See "Baker Carter report". Too bad since he's so great on elections otherwise

[rman]

29. Perhaps, but how much credibility do the Venezuelan corporate elites have?

Reading a WP article about the Baker Carter report, i come away with the impression that they think the 2004 election is as much a disaster as was the 2000 election - which according to Carter was won by Gore.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/18/AR2005091801364.html

It seems they understand enough about it to realize that one election was in fact fraudulent, and the other has at best an enormous potential for being fraudulent.
If you've got more concrete indications that Carter doesn't understand e-voting to the extent that he has "lost credibility" on the matter, i'd be curious to see those.

[Land Shark]

40. The Evidence on electronic elections is the extensive evidence

that people I know specifically submitted to Baker Carter, and they purported to listen without objection, but in the end did not say a word about the evidence or the arguments. Did not bother to implicitly refute it, either. PM me if you want to talk to the people that compiled the stuff and a bibliography of what was provided, testimony that was given, etc.

[rman]

52. Then what's the basis for Carter's claim that Gore won in 2000?

If they 'don't believe in' (electronic) election fraud?

[FighttheFuture]

39. That is irrelevant... Carter uses exit polling to confirm elections...

Yeah, the recent linkup of Carter and that puke from Bu$hitCo was a bad choice. However, Carter told the truth on Gore then, the media just ignored him.

Regardless, Carter has certified Hugo Chavez, and I would frankly take him ANY DAY, ANY WHERE over Bu$h, or any Repuglican, for that matter.

[Land Shark]

41. Exit polls are PROBABLY a good sign, if done right

if the exit polls and election are different statistically, that is cause to investigate BOTH the exit poll and the election. What were the various weights added to exit polls? Although less likely, it is possible that the exit polls, assuming they matched the election results, were similarly skewed.

This is not so much of a stretch. Gallup REGULAR polls, for example, presume a very high percentage of the public is republican. So much so that Moveon in 2004 tried to pressure gallup to change. It didn't. Anyway, these weights are necessary because sometimes you might get too many women, or too many whites, and you have to adjust to match the actual voting population proportions.... So, BECAUSE POLLSTERS ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF PREDICTING ELECTIONS they will start to weight the public as being more Republican than it really may be, in order to track an election process that (for example) systematically gives a 3% handicap to Republicans whether through suppression, provisional balloting, barriers to voting, election fraud, or a combination of the above.

I'm glad they use exit polls in VEnezuela. But they have to be good exit polls.

[Judi Lynn]

23. So much has already been written about the difference in the two systems.

Here's a short but helpful post from Peace Patriot in an earlier D.U. thread:

Here's the difference between Venezuela and the United States. Venezuela also votes electronically, but with OPEN SOURCE CODE--that is, anyone may review how the votes are tabulated. Not so in the U.S. of A.
(snip/...)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1804747#1804905

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Of COURSE the right-wing vicious, _Bush-supported Venezuelan opposition makes all KINDS of claims against Hugo Chavez. They want to resume control of Venezuela and subordinate the huge majority of poverty stricken citizens to the very small, corrupt oligarchy.

Trying to undermine the image of Venezuela's landslide-elected President (from BEFORE the e-voting, as well) is a tactic by right-wing meddlers in the States, and opposition Venezuelans with a lot of time on their hands. There's a real pile of them in South Florida now, living happily with the reactionary, violent extremists of the Cuban "exiles," _Bush's Florida base.

[skids]

25. The level of access the opposition had there was better than here.

The opposition was able to examine all sorts of logs from many parts of the system. They were able to make a case that some of the activity "looked suspicious" but from reading their material they were far from casting serious doubt on the outcome. The most fishy part was some telecommunications logs, and those had other plausible explanations.

They claim they were denied access to the central tab room by armed guard, but that was right after a forceful coup attempt, so in that situation perhaps it's understandable to do so. Hopefully Chavez will be able to put any doubt to sleep next election with more open access.

[Land Shark]

42. Open source is surely a plus, but addresses on 20% of problems with

computerized elections. Besides, even with open source, the public is still being denied the opportunity to observe, and the average citizen can not "get involved" and ran a sophisticated test to see if the software actually on each voting machine is identical to the open source code appproved and escrowed.

Besides, who is going to approve the open source? Some certifying panel either captured by or heavily lobbied by the vendors themselves. Those whistleblowing citizens will once again be relegated to the shadows trying to explain why the mere provision of open source is borderline meaningless. IT IS MERELY A SOLID platform to build on, but you still can not build verifiability for the average citizen on top of open source, because the average citizen is not a computer expert. Even if the average citizen was, if fraud occurs with open source you have one hell of a techno-explanation to make, that is long and convoluted and probably won't fit on the front page.

[oasis]

50. Bush criminals have no room to talk on the subject of voting. (n/t)

[Peace Patriot]

24. "...as Hugo Chavez won election under disputed circumstances." NOT

TRUE. Chavez's victories have been closely monitored by hundreds of international election monitors, including the Carter Center, and have been unanimously deemed to be honest and above board.

The oil elite in Venezuela--in cahoots with the Bush Cartel--has used their control of Venezuelan news media, and their access to U.S. war profiteering corporate news monopolies to spread BASELESS slander against Chavez's big majorities.

This minority of rich people want the oil profits for themselves, with no services--medical clinics, schools, community centers, small business startup loans, for Venezuela's vast poor population, who have never before been served by or represented in government. That is what Chavez is using a portion of the national oil profits for--to help the poor and thus improve the whole country. The rich oil elite therefore disputes EVERY election that Chavez has won, with the same whiny, unfounded accusations. They sound just like our own big mouth rightwing minority with their big media trumpet. And they have gone even further, and early on perpetrated a coup against Chavez, some years back, which was foiled when thousands of poor people peacefully crowded into the streets and prevented it.

"Under disputed circumstances" is a false phrase. The circumstances were CLOSELY MONITORED and the elections VERIFIED. Do we call the wingers' phrase "criminalizing politics" a genuine dispute about the pending White House indictments for outing a CIA agent, or do we call it crapola?

"Disputed" Venezuelan elections is crapola. It's like our corporate news monopolies describing Chavez as "increasingly authoritarian." Where is the frigging EVIDENCE for either thing? There is NONE.

Venezuela votes electronically, as we do, with one hugely significant difference: THEY have OPEN SOURCE programming code in their machines--meaning that anyone may review how the votes are tabulated. We have "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code.

Open source = good president, good government.

Secret, proprietary programming code = bad president, bad government.

It's quite simple, really.

They also have a VVPB, as noted above. (And they also use fingerprint ID.)

I don't know what-all might be going on with Sequoia and the State Department, but I wish somebody would ask Antonio Mujico why the hell Venezuela gets open source code, and we do not? Hm-m-m?

[rman]

31. An example of biassed MSM reporting

Much like "Chavez' presidency causes tensions in Venezuela" - which is true; the business elite minority is quite tense about Chavez spending the nations wealth on its people rather then on the rich elites.
But in the MSM it is never mentioned just how much tension the preceding regime caused in the poor majority in Venezuela. Nor is it ever reported in the MSM that Bush's presidency creates tensions in the US, and in the rest of the world for that matter.

[Land Shark]

43. Hi peace patriot, while you may have the better of the argument

when it comes to the actual question of who won in Venezuela, the election most certainly is "disputed". Perhaps not properly disputed, but disputed by the anti-Chavez forces nonetheless. While you may be fighting on the right side, let's not take the point into absurdity by pretending that there is no other side that disputes the election, because there is.

Open source is an improvement, but a small one that still guarantees that votes and vote counting are invisible. Computers guarantee that election officials can play voting-booth distribution games like Blackwell did in Ohio. Expensive bottlenecks, they are.

I wonder if the avarege venezuela can evaluate open source, and verify whether or not THEY have a real democracy.

Peace Patriot you may be missing my point. Computers in elections INHERENTLY create disputability and uncertainty in elections because it is no longer CLEAR UP FRONT who won. YOu have to resort to complicated (even though correct) arguments about exit polls, data, etc. Complication starts the political race a mile behind.

[Cocoa]

26. why did the State Dept deny him entry?

what was the reason given?

If unknown, what do people think was the reason?

[Helga Scow Stern]

28. I was wondering the same thing.

[Land Shark]

44. Follow the sources for more news, he will get his visa eventually or soon

they will pull all the strings they can for him so this is not a permanent state of affairs I would hazard to guess. Sequoia is apparently spinning this as a technical work visa denial but a source in Venezuela disagrees, as I heard.

[madrchsod]

27. one fifth of our oil comes from venezuela

g-boy has 3 more years to piss him off so bad he cuts off the oil to the usa and sells it all to china.

[Time for change]

30. I wonder how they would explain this one?

assuming that it would get enough coverage that there would be a need to explain it.

This is great information.

[rman]

32. Bush: "I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation"

"I'm the commander, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the US President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation...."
-- G W Bush, The Independent 2002

[Time for change]

33. That's pretty good

You convinced me.

[Amaryllis]

38. is this called arrogance? Unbelievable...he doesn't even have the

savvy to pretend to be humble.

[AtLiberty]

34. Nominated!

[redacted]

35. kick. Wish we knew more.

[suffragette]

36. nominated and kick

[autorank]

37. Land Shark's Thread Up *17* hours. Where's CM (corporate media)

This is serious stuff. Let me reiterate,

Sequoia has between 20-33% of the voting machine market in the United States
It's owned by a company whose head honcho can't even get a US Visa.

How screwed up is that?

Hey CM, hint, hint, this might be a big story.

You won't even have to reference DU.

It will make you feel better in the morning.

"Publish or ..... whatever"

[Land Shark]

45. Thanks Autorank, it is a story even though after pulling strings he

will get his visa one way or the other, it's too embarrassing to the status quo for him NOT to get it. Heck even a lot of moderate democrats who aren't really up on election issues could be prevailed upon to reverse this embarrassment in order to "maintain confidence in elections". That is the precise motivation for many things that are done. Confidence can prevail over truth.

On edit: but after succeeding in getting some kind of visa with help from american connections, the CM will try to rationalize that the story would then be a moot story.

But, the contrast still stands, why would we have an owner of an election company that counts votes in secret not HAVE TO have the highest security clearance in a democracy??? (much less tolerating a denied visa)

i.e. there's a story here no matter what the reaction may be by Mugica and his business and political contacts in America.

[autorank]

49. This is truly a dilemma! Damned if they do; damned if they don't.

But we're damned by the silence of CM. This is just one of those mind blowers.

Consider me a fully subscribed member of the Great Northwestern Freedom and Democracy movement (you, understandinglife, the Guv and your cohorts in the Northwest). Washington and Oregon are the new Massachusetts Colony (circa 1760's-1770's). Why not? You folks have a good deal out there, something worth fighting for. And California is the modern day version of Virginia; nah, that doesn't work. They're, well, California!

On edit: I should acknowledge TruthIsAll, althecat, and all the great early 2004 Elections Research & Discussion Forum rabble rousers who punched holes in the legitimacy of this government from day one. They're the Boston Tea Party of ths whole movement.

[EnfantTerrible]

46. I posted a thread about it too

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5100619

Landshark beat me to the punch!

[Land Shark]

47. Thanks for the link Enfant Terrible, we should combine our votes

for greatest page and claim a total of 37 for the work of votersunite.org Check out their web page. It doesn't change every single day but they put out good information and check it out.

[EnfantTerrible]

48. Can we do that?

Who do we ask? Wasn't your post on the home page yesterday?

I'll check out votersunite.org. Thanks for the link...