Looking for something to be alarmed about? Forget Dubai. Try Venezuela's potential takeover of the U.S. voting apparatus. A secretive, intransparent company called 'Smartmatic' that's known to have ties to the Venezuelan government, has just bought a U.S. voting machine company called Sequoia. And the deal has gotten no scrutiny from federal regulators, who cite outdated criteria for national military security as their only watchpoint.

That's right, Venezuela, a country that holds the dirtiest, filthiest most intransparent and fraudulent elections in the hemisphere, elections that match those of Zimbabwe or Belarus, has just got its hands on a U.S. electronic voting company and now might be in charge with the outcome of your vote. There is not one good thing about this deal. Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has done an extraordinary job of ferreting the first reports of this information out here.  And the Miami Herald has a spectacular editorial.

Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has long used soft power against the U.S., through the manipulation of oil prices and the distribution of cheap heating fuel to select poor contingencies in a bid to buy loyalty. He's also funded a very active propaganda office, whose chief purpose has been to intimidate U.S. news media like the Los Angeles Times into publishing Venezuela's otherwise not—worth—bothering—about government tripe. It openly organizes letter—writing campaigns using swarms of U.S. leftists as its semi—covert agents. Now, Chavez has moved on to far more ambitious things like getting a grip on the U.S. voting apparatus itself.

Venezuela's electoral system is based on a system of highly suspect electronic machines. These machines have been demonstrated to have the capacity to record voter identities and match them with cast ballots. This was proven  in Venezuela in November 2005. These machines also appear to have flipped final tally results, as seemingly happened in August 2004, a sham election endorsed by the odious Jimmy Carter who ——— amazingly —— endorsed the obviously fraudulent recall referendum as "free and fair" and tried to undermine any other sources with evidence to the contrary.

All of these horrible things brought Venezuela its current dictatorship. Smartmatic's voting machines are the chief reason why Venezuelans no longer trust their voting systems and why at least 82% of them refused to vote at all during December 2005's elections, something I witnessed myself in Caracas.

With Chavez already convincingly shown to have been meddling in Mexico's  and in Peru's elections right now, there is no doubt in the slightest that Chavez intends to do as much as he can to destroy our elections in our free system here, too. He's got his eyes on us. He intends to destroy our elections and put a candidate to his liking as high up as he can go in our government in our next election.

This must be stopped.

A.M. Mora y Leon 03 27 06