From Jarius Bondoc:
Comelec to ignore this too?
MEXICO’s state of Tabasco is to punish election automation seller Smartmatic Corp. for messing up big time last June’s balloting.
Election officials have stopped payment to the Venezuelan firm for the fiasco, and ordered the return of 8.5 million Mexican pesos advanced to it. Over 80 candidates and political parties sought an investigation. Lawmen prevented Smartmatic execs and engineers from fleeing.
Tabasco authorities had contracted the Venezuelan firm electronically to transmit and canvass within 12 hours the preliminary results of 21 local council elections. Smartmatic flopped, transmitting only 45% of results more than a day after the close of the balloting.
That was similar to Smartmatic’s failure in the PHILIPPINES to finish the senatorial count in Election 2013. It transmitted only 76% of precinct tallies to the Comelec central server. The missing 24% represents millions of votes in the race that had losers trailing winners by mere tens of thousands. The difference, though, is that Comelec officials continue to grant Smartmatic multibillion-peso deals to supply opaque, flawed vote-counting machines.
The Tabasco fiasco is big news in the Americas. Comelec officials can ask the Philippine embassy in Mexico, or surf the Internet for info (mostly in Spanish, entiendes?). They will learn that:
• Smartmatic demoed its supposedly superior technology in eight mock polls prior to the real thing. Detected errors were left uncorrected. “Absoluto fracaso (total failure),” an unimpressed congressman ominously remarked.
• On Election Day, June 7, the Smartmatic system crashed. With poll results unprocessed, election officers had to step in and finish the job using an internal system. The final count was released way past the expected time.
• Smartmatic was supposed to beam provisional results every 20 minutes, starting 8 p.m. of June 7, and finish by 8 a.m. the next day. But when its system went down at 7:30 p.m. of June 7, it transmitted data only at 1:17 a.m. of June 8, and only 2%. All Smartmatic could yield later by 7:30 p.m. was 45% in one election and 30% in another.
Smartmatic was also blamed for BRAZIL’s fraudulent presidential election in Oct. 2014.
The plot has been exposed in the blog henrymakow.com. First, the ruling Marxist party’s election lawyer was made head of the supposedly independent election commission (like in the Philippines in Jan. 2011). He in turn hired Smartmatic to supply the voting systems and machines. At the official 5 p.m. close of balloting on Election Day, Oct. 26, all the results were withheld on the pretext that voting still was ongoing in one state, Acre, at 8 p.m. Then, the figures were fudged. Pollsters were barred from conducting exit polls.
Smartmatic also rigged the Venezuela referendum of 2003 to keep strongman Hugo Chavez in office for life. He paid it $220 million, with which it acquired US firm Sequoia Election Systems that had contracts in 17 states.
A bungled Sequoia vote count in CHICAGO in 2005 led to a US Congress investigation of Smartmatic’s Venezuelan owners. To avoid exposure, Smartmatic hastily sold Sequoia to its US execs. Whereupon, Dominion Voting System of Canada bought into Sequoia, while also licensing Smartmatic to sell its PCOS (precinct count optical scanners).
Last Nov. 2014 the election clerk of Mineral County, NEVADA, sued Dominion for poll fraud. Allegedly the PCOS counted hundreds more votes than were actually cast. The balloting results in Nevada statewide also came under question.
In the Philippines, the Comelec has spent P16 billion to lease-purchase, accessorize, and warehouse 82,000 PCOS units. The machines have been used only twice, in 2010 and 2013. The Comelec is mothballing them to buy 94,000 new ones, at P14.5 billion, no accessories and storage yet, for use in Election 2016.
