First off, imagine you are a political visionary and have worked for justice and equality and finally get into power through the democratic process after a popular uprising and the sheer force of the populace loosens the dictator’s grip. You have plenty of oil revenues and things looked good with you introducing a billion dollars of social reforms, improving literacy, reducing poverty and a section of your people love you. But you overestimate your support generally, get involved in the corruption you were supposed to eradicate, cannot completely ignore the Constitution and are forced to hold a Referendum on your future, “should I stay or should I be fired?”. You have a very real chance of losing the referendum and the way things go that means your successor will probably chuck you in jail and/or shoot you.
Who should you call?
Well your mates up the road who make electronic voting machines and load it up with Smartmatic Voting Software – they guarantee you can ensure the vote goes in your favour by:
- Up front weighting of votes for a particular candidate – so a vote for me has, say a value 2.2, a vote for my opponent 1.8: this means the vote has a “prima facie” plausibility – that is, if the population is split 48 for me 52 for my opponent, it will look close but I will be guaranteed to win.
- Preset the machine to reject 68.2% of ballots and then automatically send them to an “adjudicator” – who then manually enters the vote for those ballots. The machine does not record who the adjudicator is or present any audit trail but simply records the “corrected” vote.
- The voting machine has an active connection to the internet – ostensibly to facilitate “updates” which means you can change the voting software post-certification as “valid” with your more “favourable” computer code or with “after-the-fact corrections“. The software is even kind enough to “call home” if things are not going your way so that you upload the “corrected” software to pull things back to your desired end-result.
Such was Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s strategy to rig the referendum on his future when he was facing a recall from the country’s Electoral Commission in 2004. As a former military officer and revolutionary leader, he already owned the military and the judiciary, but fired 300 000 previously loyal supporters who were government workers who were disgusted at his corruption and upgraded all the voting machines with these new voting machines and Smartmatic Software.
How do we know all this? Well thanks to a Professor Gutavo Delfino, a Mathematics professor and an alumni from the University of Michigan, who after 7 years of research and 4 years of peer review, published his findings in 2011 in the benchmark Statisical Science journal demonstrating how the Smartmatic software rigged the election, identifying the precise algorithm used to weight the results and at what point in the voting process the mechanical operation of the machines could be compromised.
Very interesting you might muse, what has this to do with today? Well, fast forward to 2020 and Smartmatic Software is the very same software employed in the Dominion Voting Systems used in our very own American Presidential Elections in a large number of “swing” States. Dominion Voting Systems has its HQ in Canada but Canada will not use their systems, citing security concerns, as did a large number of “red” US-States. However, what is even more interesting about Dominion Voting Systems is that via a couple of shell companies it is actually owned by another entity in which 3 out of the 7 board members are Chinese nationals.
Just what rational reason is there that you want to use compromised Chinese voting machines loaded with compromised software?
Well, you want to rig your election, of course!
It is particularly ironic that Professor Gutavo Delfino was an alumni of the University of Michigan and that is was Steve Henley, a Democratic candidate running for supervisor of elections in Hillsborough County, Florida, who sent a letter to Capitol Hill describing what he saw in 2004 after being invited by the opposition parties in Venezuela to be an observer. Professor Gutavo Delfino’s work was used as part of an affadavit submitted in the forensic review currently being carried out of voting in a number of Michigan Counties now by Allied Security Operations Group, a technical consultancy specialising in cybersecurity used by the DoD, Secret Service, DHS and the CIA.
You can read their entire interim report here. I warn you, it is not a pleasant read for anyone interested in preserving democracy.
It shows negligence, fraud and malpractice and a contempt for guarding the sanctity of people’s votes. The author concludes this is without any equivocation a “national security matter” and says it is in clear violation of the Executive Order instituted by President Obama on National Critical Infrastructure on 6 January 2017. This was subsequently strengthened by President Trump in 2018 to include the following provision:
“to include requirements to ensure US election systems, processes, and its people were not manipulated by foreign meddling, either through electronic or systemic manipulation, social media, or physical changes made in hardware, software, or supporting systems”
It is clear that the Intelligence Community and we have to conclude their wider political masters, were well aware of the compromised state of electronic voting systems. They should never have been allowed to have been employed in an election of this magnitude under these conditions.
This interim report, without doubt, is the “smoking gun” for the previously “unsubstantiated” or “circumstantial” fraud and corruption charges branded as the “conspiracy theory” of a beaten and sore loser. Neither the Supreme Court (yet), Senate Republicans or Democrats or the recently resigned Attorney General are showing the stomach to really demonstrate the compromised state of the American electoral arrangments (let us be honest, of modern American democracy) in key swing states with possible direct Chinese espionage – understandably so – we are talking lynch-mob threats against them already. The judges would probably need to be transferred to secure compounds and be guarded 24-hours a day, like our good friends over Trump’s wall in “lawless” Mexico.
At least we have been warned about what is coming next to America, the Chinese social system – apparently 18 Democratic governors have already put out “feelers” for possible cooperation with China in the Biden era. Money, even if it is Chinese, covers the multitude of sins. I am currently in the early stages of a debate with those who believe “democracy” does not matter anymore and there is nothing “God-given” about the republican, as in the historical, constitutional American republic, system of government (Let us just ‘cancel’ it? Sounds familiar?), so there is no Christian reason to defend it. To me, that is utterly socially irresponsible and a fundamentally ignorant political position to support. Ask your Central American and Cuban refugees in Florida, Eastern Europeans that migrated West as soon as the Berlin Wall fell and you realise how privileged we were to be free and how jealously we should guard our democracy.