Q&A of the Day – Smartmatic Executives Indicted for Bribery in the Southern District of Florida
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Today’s Entry: Mr. Mudd, thanks for this and for filling in for Mark Levin over the past few years. Always great. Talking of early voting: given your first-hand experience with voting machines in FL, what do you make of the Federal grand jury indictment of Smartmatic (Southern District, FL)?
Bottom Line: My thoughts are that this is of no impact in the 2024 US elections and that the alleged behavior of three key executives also wasn’t of any impact in the 2020 elections. First, here’s a look at the indictment referenced in today’s note. According to the Department of Justice last Thursday...
<A federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida returned an indictment today charging three executives of an election voting machine and service provider company and a former Chairman of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) of the Republic of the Philippines for their roles in an alleged bribery and money laundering scheme to retain and obtain business related to the 2016 Philippine elections.
According to the indictment, between 2015 and 2018, Roger Alejandro Pinate Martinez, 49, a Venezuelan citizen and resident of Boca Raton, Florida, and Jorge Miguel Vasquez, 62, a U.S. citizen and resident of Davie, Florida, together with others, allegedly caused at least $1 million in bribes to be paid to Juan Andres Donato Bautista, 60, the former Chairman of COMELEC. 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 co-conspirators allegedly funded the bribes through a slush fund that was created by over-invoicing the cost per voting machine for the 2016 Philippine elections. To conceal and disguise the nature and purpose of the corrupt payments, the co-conspirators used coded language to refer to the slush fund and caused the creation of fraudulent contracts and sham loan agreements to justify transfers. The co-conspirators then allegedly laundered funds related to the bribery scheme through bank accounts located in Asia, Europe, and the United States, including in the Southern District of Florida.>
Now, while that plays out here’s what’s important in this conversation as it pertains to US election security. As was noted by Smartmatic following the indictment of three of its executives including a cofounder... No voter fraud has been alleged and Smartmatic is not indicted. Still, voters worldwide must be assured that the elections they participate in are conducted with the utmost integrity and transparency. These are the values that Smartmatic lives by. What’s just as important in this conversation is that while many allegations were made about Smartmatic’s voting systems following the 2020 election, they weren’t actually even in use anywhere that fraud was alleged to have occurred. The only jurisdiction that used Smartmatic voting machines in the 2020 election was Las Angeles.
In the wake of the 2020 election, while debunking many of the voter fraud allegations, I brought you this in breaking down the names of voting machine companies called in to question during that cycle: To be clear, there’s no evidence Dominion’s systems have been compromised, could be compromised or aren’t reliable. However, there are legacy systems which are potentially a problem. Specifically, Sequoia voting systems.
Sequoia voting systems has one heck of an awful elections track record. What company was responsible for the ballots in 2000 which created pregnant, hanging and dimpled chads? Sequoia. And when they released their next generation products, the problems only grew. By 2004 they were working with a Venezuelan owned company called Smartmatic. The Sequoia voting systems, programmed by Smartmatic, were first used in the 2004 recall election of Hugo Chavez. Chavez won that election by 20% in a vote which was deemed not credible by most outside observers in addition to most Venezuelan voters. Subsequently government watchdogs began investigating the Sequoia systems and in 2006 the US Committee on Foreign Investment investigation into the Smartmatic programmed Sequoia systems determined the following: “The role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts.” Additionally, it was found that the systems could be manipulated by users to flip votes from one candidate to another and could be easily hacked. With worldwide attention on these systems, led by the Bush administration at the time, Smartmatic sold Sequoia in December of 2006. This (was) the root of the Venezuelan conspiracy involving Dominion.
Smartmatic hadn’t owned Sequoia since 2006 and that was the last time the company had a significant footprint within the United States. Therefore, the recent indictment of three executives certainly doesn’t help with Smartmatic’s credibility. But in reality, within the United States, the biggest impact of the indictment is in aiding Fox News’ legal defense for defamation against Smartmatic related to false reporting following the 2020 election. Smartmatic is currently suing Fox News for over $2 billion following the $787.5 million settlement with Dominion that led to the ouster of Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino from the network.