2010 HuffPo: Venezuela owned intellectual property of Dominion software

According to a 2010 investigation at Huffington Post, the Intellectual Property of Dominion voting systems was still owned at that time by a firm linked to the Venezuelan President, despite their press statement to the contrary.

Whether or not this report is still valid is not the point. The point is this is a national security concern.

This is likely part of Sidney Powell’s case if true, and we can’t confirm that.

THE STORY

In 2010, the Canadian-based Dominion Voting Systems had quietly announced its second acquisition of a major U.S. voting machine company. And they lied about it.

In HuffPo’s previous breaking coverage detailing the SEC’s fraud lawsuits filed against Diebold and a number of their top executives, they sold off their troubled election division to a “new” company renamed Premier. Diebold/Premier’s assets were purchased by a small Canadian firm by the name of Dominion Voting.

Their purchase of Diebold/Premier’s assets was actually made from ES&S, the world’s largest voting machine company, who was forced to divest of the assets they’d purchased from Diebold as part of an anti-trust suit settlement with the DoJ.

Dominion CEO John Poulos who, in the company’s press release [PDF] announced the Diebold/Premier asset acquisition, stated ominously: “We are extremely pleased to conclude this transaction, which…will allow Dominion to expand its capabilities and operational footprint to every corner of the United States.”

The company lied and said they wanted to stir competition. Meanwhile, they were buying up all the voting systems.

According to a company press release [PDF] quietly issued on June 4th, 2010, Dominion also acquired what had previously been the third-largest voting machine company in the U.S., Sequoia Voting Systems.

As The BRAD BLOG confirmed, the new press release from Dominion lied about what the company has and hasn’t purchased from Sequoia, a company which had lied, for years, about the real ownership of its proprietary voting systems.

They bought up 50% of the U.S. voting assets.

Where was the DoJ? Apparently, they thought it was okay.

Four corporations controlled the voting systems in the U.S. before this:

• 40% ES&S
• 30% Diebold/Premier
• 20% Sequoia
• 10% Hart Intercivic

By June 4, 2010, it looked like this, roughly:

• 50% Dominion (Diebold/Premier, Sequoia)
• 40% ES&S
• 10% Hart Intercivic

According to The BRAD BLOG, Dominion purchased the remaining hardware and software assets and potential customer base of Diebold/Premier. They purchased the actual customer contracts, and the hardware and software, in their acquisition of Sequoia.

Dominion’s spokesperson, formerly of Diebold, formerly the Press Secretary for the Secretary of State of Georgia, was Chris Riggall. You can read his claims at HuffPo.

Dominion’s purchase of Sequoia and the following announcement in Dominion’s press release upon the purchase of Sequoia:

As part of the transaction, Dominion has acquired Sequoia’s inventory and all intellectual property, including software, firmware, and hardware, for Sequoia’s precinct and central count optical scan and DRE voting solutions, including BPS, WinEDS, Edge, Edge2, Advantage, Insight, InsightPlus and 400C systems.

Not true!

As part of a detailed investigative exposé series in 2008, HuffPo broke the story of Hart Intercivic’s quietly attempted hostile takeover of Sequoia; HuffPo revealed the fact that — despite representations to the contrary, possibly even to U.S. government investigators — the IP for the vast-majority/near-entirety of Sequoia’s voting systems was actually secretly owned by the Hugo Chavez-tied, Venezuelan-based firm, Smartmatic.

The continuing control of the IP was discovered by The BRAD BLOG long after the (largely) Rightwing outrage, which had forced a federal investigation into Smartmatic’s control over American elections, had died down.

Sequoia was then supposedly purchased away from Smartmatic by a team of its U.S. executives to make it fully independent from the Chavez-tied parent company.

They Never Divested

But that divestiture was a lie.

Sequoia hadn’t publicly disclosed that Smartmatic still retained legal ownership of the IP used in all of their voting machines, a fact that wasn’t publicly revealed until HuffPo’s exposé.

Dominion’s Riggall admitted directly in a follow-up reply email to The BRAD BLOG: “Smartmatic IP was not included in the Sequoia transaction, since Sequoia did not own it.”

Despite Dominion’s asserted belief in “transparency” (the front page of their website boasts “Welcome Transparency,” and their announcement of the purchase of Diebold/Premier cites “Dominion’s culture of transparency”), Riggall was unable to share the company’s two purchase agreements with HuffPo due to “non-disclosure provisions in both” of them. “Legally,” he wrote, “neither can be shared.”

Nonetheless, the answer is clear: Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was still tied to a huge percentage of U.S. Elections, as now overseen by a Canadian firm.

DoJ & CFIUS Okayed It?

According to the Dominion press release, if the rest of it can be believed, the Sequoia purchase was “reviewed by the U. S. Department of Justice and nine state attorneys general” and “also reviewed in detail and received approval by the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).”

Those meetings are secret.

Two inquiries to Riggal at the time on whether CFIUS, DoJ, or the nine state attorneys general were informed of Smartmatic’s continuing ownership of Dominion/Sequoia’s IP were sent. Neither was answered. The last query was sent on June 12th, 2010, and neither Riggall nor anyone else from Dominion has bothered to answer the simple question.

The appalling revolving door of U.S. electoral control and administration continues to spin, along with the compromise of federal and localized oversight.

Read the entire report at Huffington Post.

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