That Venezuela smell was back in U.S. election news when the press reported that a voting machine 'glitch' flipped some 6,000 votes cast for President Trump to Joe Biden in Michigan.

Hadn't we heard that story before? Flipped votes in computer systems? The last time we heard about that was in Venezuela's 2004 fraud-plagued recall referendum on then-President Hugo Chavez. Millions and millions of Venezuelans marched in the streets against him , and then when the recall referendum was held, it failed hugely, something that seemed very strange given the size of the crowds. That was the fiasco that official election observer Jimmy Carter praised so highly as free and fair "despite what went on in the totalization room" according to the Carter Center report. After that, computer scientists from Amherst, Stanford, U.C. Santa Cruz, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard all found evidence of vote flipping statistically speaking. Besides their conclusions that it was a statistical impossibility, a well-known pollster, Penn, Schoen & Berland, taking exit polls at the same referendum found that 60% were in favor of throwing Chavez out, and 40% favored keeping him. Much to his surprise, the scorecard came out in almost the exact reverse, 58-42. Flipped.

And there are machines that flip votes. It's one reason why many, such as Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, thinks only a return to paper ballots and in-person voting will restore confidence in flawed electoral systems.

According to this fascinating thread of apparently conservative coders and engineers, the sense is that the fraud wasn't directly written into the code, which would have been easy to detect. More likely, it was embedded into the compiler, deep into the back-end of the computer program. They wrote:

EastBlocSurplus 5 points 1 day ago +5 / -0

As Andrea Widburg noted in her excellent piece here, the company name for these vote-flipping machines, is named Dominion.

And guess what: They're using the same technology as Smartmatic, the mysterious Venezuelan company that blew in from nowhere with a gargantuan contract to count the Venezuelan votes, starting with that flawed recall referendum. In fact, the companies, via the intermediary subsidiary Sequoia, used to be the same. According to Wikipedia:

After losing money for several years, on March 8, 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, a multi-national technology company which had developed advanced election systems, voting machines included. Thereafter Smartmatic assigned a major portion of its development and managerial teams, dedicated to revamping some of Sequoia's old-fashioned, legacy voting machines, and replacing their technology with avant-garde proprietary features and developments, which resulted in new, high-tech products. As a result, Sequoia sold many new-generation election products and experienced a healthy financial resurrection during the fiscal years of 2006 and 2007. However, in November 2007, following a verdict by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Smartmatic was ordered to sell Sequoia, which it did to its Sequoia managers having U.S. citizenship.^[11]

^{And here, from the same Wikipedia entry, is the rest of the story:}

Sequoia Voting Systems was a California-based company that is one of the largest providers of electronic voting systems in the U.S., having offices in Oakland, Denver and New York City. Some of its major competitors were Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) and Election Systems & Software.

It was acquired by the Canadian company Dominion Voting Systems on June 4, 2010. At the time it had contracts for 300 jurisdictions in 16 states through its BPS, WinEDS, Edge, Edge2, Advantage, Insight, InsightPlus and 400C systems.^[1]

So in short, Venezuelan-led Smartmatic bought U.S.-based Sequoia, put its technology into Sequoia, and then sold it to Dominion. Dominion denies having anything to do with Smartmatic now, though at one point it allowed Smartmatic to market its same technology abroad in places where Dominion didn't do business (they got into a lawsuit over Puerto Rico), but the bottom line is that the technology is all the same because it was all the same company.

The same voting machine technology that is responsible for Michigan's voting fiasco, and apparently that of 30-some other states, had its origins in Caracas.

Here's a good article in the Wall Street Journal from three years ago showing just how that machine-based fraud in Venezuela was and is still done:

EL CASABE, Venezuela—Aires Pérez Rodríguez traveled by canoe for three hours to deliver the paper receipts showing a total of 225 votes cast for state governor in this hamlet. Then he passed them to his aunt, who drove them a further 150 miles to the Bolívar state capital.

When the official count was released days after the Oct. 15 election, however, there were an extra 471 votes for the government’s candidate. It wasn’t just Mr. Pérez, the opposition party’s election monitor, who noticed. The ruling Socialist Party’s own election supervisor in El Casabe realized it, too.

“This is illegal,” said Luciano Mendoza, the election supervisor, who showed The Wall Street Journal the voting-machine receipts that counted just a third as many votes from the hamlet as reported by electoral authorities later. “They say they bring justice, but instead they commit fraud.”

Mr. Pérez’s evidence prompted opposition officials in Ciudad Bolívar to make more comparisons of voting receipts to an official tally on the National Electoral Council’s website. All told, in records reviewed by the Journal, they discovered that more than 2,500 votes were added statewide, flipping the winner of the Bolívar state election from the opposition candidate—briefly listed as the winner on the Electoral Council’s website—to the government choice.

The declared winner, Justo Noguera, a National Guard general from outside the state who never held political office, took office two days later in a surprise midnight ceremony.

“There’s clear manipulation here,” said Luis Lander, director of the Venezuelan Electoral Observatory, a nonpartisan group in Caracas that tracks elections after he examined voting-machine receipts that the opposition alliance posted online. “The results were altered to allow the losing candidate to be declared the winner.”

Sound familiar? Michigan and Wisconsin have both reported counties with more votes than voters, same as happened in this little Venezuelan village in 2017. And Michigan has discovered the same vote flippings. Coincidence? It's just like Venezuela.

Worse still, our engineers on this bulletin board cited above, say that there's a retired U.S. general out there, Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, who gave this fearsomely prescient interview to a former intelligence official, Michael Scheur and someone named Captain Mike, warning of electronic chaos one day before the election:

McInerney states that the Biden campaign is in possession of some kind of intelligence-community developed software on the DNC server at an unknown location, which was originally devised to manipulate election results and thwart terrorists in third world hellholes. James Clapper and John Brennan, he says, apparently were involved in transferring the CIA technology to them. He said it explains why Biden never bothered to campaign, because the fix was in. If it was an intelligence-developed operation, it would explain why the flipping device was placed in the hard-even-for-professionals to reach compiler. He said it was called "hammer" and it had an app called "scorecard."

I don't know a lot about McInerney, his Wikipedia page says he is a decorated general from the Vietnam War era, and he's certainly conservative. He has said one errant thing about John McCain being 'Songbird John' which apparently got him off Fox News, according to Wikipedia, but otherwise seems pretty solid. Still, caution is in order, given the size of his charges.

If so much as a word of what he says is true, it opens the gates to Hugo Chavez-level fraud, from top to bottom in U.S. electoral systems. It points to U.S. spy technology used against America. And most of all, it points to the critical importance of fighting these crazy abormal election results from team Trump, and getting to the bottom of this strange electronic activity and why this result happened. Was it people? Was it tech? Was it a combination of all to steal an election? If McInerney is right, it means that Democrats have used Hugo's electoral fraud as a how-to guide and ramped it up with supercharged technology.

It's never a good sign when 'Venezuela' and its ways get brought up in anyone's election. America's voters need some answers.

Image credit: Pixabay public domain