Sequoia- The Origin Story

"Sequoia Voting Systems was a California-based company that is one of the largest providers of electronic voting systems in the U.S.

In late 1997, Sequoia obtained the intellectual property rights to the Optech line of ballot scanners from Business Records Corporation. This transfer was a consequence of antitrust action taken by the United States Department of Justice when American Information Systems merged with the Election Services Division of Business Records Corporation to form Election Systems & Software. After this merger ES&S retained the right to sell and service Optech scanners to existing customers; as a result, the ES&S Optech IV-C and the Sequoia Optech 400-C, for example, are essentially the same device.

In early 2002 De La Rue, a British currency paper printing and security company took over ownership from Smurfit for $23 million. After losing money for several years, on March 8, 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, a multi-national technology company founded by three Venezuelan software engineers, which had developed advanced election systems, including voting machines. Smartmatic machines and software were used in the 2004 Venezuelan recall referendum, which resulted in two studies, an exit poll and cluster analysis, indicating "massive fraud" that flipped the result in favor of dictator Hugo Chávez.

After acquiring Sequioa, 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.

Certain assets were 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.

In Feb. 2014 Sequoia filed a bankruptcy petition under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Voting_Systems

Oh, but it gets better! Do you know who Bitza Corp is?

Until a year ago (2003), the Bizta Corp. was a struggling Venezuelan software company with barely a sales deal to its name, records show. Then, the Venezuelan government — through a venture capital fund — invested about $200,000 and bought 28 percent of it.

The government’s investment in Bizta made Venezuela Bizta’s largest single shareholder and, ultimately, its most important client.

The National Electoral Council members have hailed Bizta’s software-writing role as contributing to Venezuelan ”sovereignty” over their voting system, which replaces American-designed machines. Chávez, an outspoken critic of U.S. policy, is viewed as leftist and anti-American.

https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2004/05/28/another-detail-cne-forgot-to-disclose/

Antonio Mugica owned Smartmatic and Bizta

The Venezuela connection

The company(smartmatic), founded in Florida in 1999 by Venezuelan engineers Antonio Mugica, Alfredo José Anzola and Roger Piñate, initially focused on developing networking applications for sharing information between electronics devices, such as cameras. The founders listed a residential address in Boca Raton, Fla., as their headquarters on corporate documents they filed in Delaware the next year.

But the company’s focus switched to voting machines, and its business operations became concentrated in Venezuela, after the government there awarded a contract to Smartmatic and Bizta, another small software company Mugica owned with his father. The transaction raised a lot of concern.

Neither Smartmatic nor Bizta were very successful until their fortunes began to change in June 2003, when the latter received $200,000 from an organization that acted as an investment arm of the Venezuelan government, according to reporting by The Miami Herald. The money gave the government a 28 percent stake in Bizta, making it the company’s top shareholder, The New York Times later reported. The investment also gave the government a seat on Bizta’s board, which went to a close associate of the president of Venezuela at the time, Hugo Chávez.

The investment came as support was growing in the country for a recall election aimed at removing Chávez, a longtime foe of the U.S. who had been fighting internal opposition for years. In December 2003, Chávez’s political opponents announced they had obtained enough signatures to initiate a recall referendum. And in February 2004, six months before the recall election was to occur, the National Electoral Council announced that it had awarded a contract to Bizta and Smartmatic to replace the nation's existing voting machines — optical-scan machines made by the U.S. company Election Systems & Software — with new touchscreen machines.

Bizta, Smartmatic and the state-run telecommunications organization CANTV won the $91 million contract in a bidding process denounced by two of the five members of the electoral council, who voted against the contract.

Neither Bizta nor Smartmatic had ever built systems used in an election, and the two council members alleged that the bidding process had been secret, according to the Miami Herald. Chávez survived the subsequent referendum amid allegations that he and his supporters rigged the election.

Accusations about their association with the election and the government have dogged Bizta and Smartmatic ever since. Both companies have long said they have no ties to the Venezuelan government. After the Miami Herald exposed the $200,000 investment in Bizta, the company said the money was merely a loan and paid it back. As for Smartmatic, 83 percent of the company’s shares are owned today by the Mugica and Piñate families, according to company spokesperson Daniel Murphy, with the remaining shares held by employees and investors.

Following its success in the Venezuelan election, Smartmatic set its sights on the U.S. market. In 2005, it paid $16 million to acquire Sequoia Voting Systems, a British-owned, California-based company whose touchscreen voting machines were used in Washington, D.C., and 17 states at the time. But in June 2006, following a request from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States began investigating the purchase and the company’s possible connections to the Venezuelan government.

This proved complicated because the company had diversified into a series of holding companies and trusts in the Netherlands and the Caribbean island of Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles. Maloney accused executives of trying to obscure ownership of the company, but Smartmatic said the reorganization was simply part of its push to expand internationally. Smartmatic initially refused to cooperate with the government probe, according to Maloney, then agreed to participate, before announcing in December 2006 that it was going to sell Sequoia to put an end to the inquiry.

“[T]he CFIUS review recommended measures and conditions that both Sequoia and Smartmatic found too onerous to accept,” Murphy wrote in an email to POLITICO. “Smartmatic and CFIUS agreed the best way forward was for Smartmatic to voluntarily dispose of its interest in Sequoia.”

The company focused its attention instead on markets outside the U.S., most notably in Europe, where it’s been pushing internet voting, and in the Philippines, where it was embroiled in further controversy in 2016.

Authorities there accused the company’s employees of altering a script on an election server without authorization as results were being transmitted during a national election that year. The Philippine Justice Department charged the head of Smartmatic’s technical support team and two subordinates, along with three employees of the Commission on Elections, who gave them access to the server.

In court documents, the Smartmatic employees said they only corrected an error in the script that was turning the letter “n” in candidates’ names into a question mark whenever the “n” had a tilde over it. But critics contended that votes in the race for vice president changed dramatically after the script change. Investigators didn’t probe the nature of the changes to determine if they did affect the outcome, according to the Justice Department; they focused only on the fact that the script was changed without authorization.

Smartmatic’s Murphy told POLITICO the changes occurred on a server that provided the media and political parties with unofficial results, not on the system that tallies votes. He also said that a regional court dismissed the case in August on grounds that prosecutors could not prove the facts. POLITICO has not been able to independently verify that.

As for the Los Angeles County project, Murphy told POLITICO that the system was created by employees in its U.S.-based office and that all code used in the system “was developed in the United States and has never been offshore.”

Smartmatic has since approached its latest foray into U.S. elections more strategically than in the past, gradually reforming its previous image as an uncooperative outsider.

It was one of the first voting system vendors to join the Department of Homeland Security’s Sector Coordinating Council for the Election Infrastructure Subsector. The company also established a U.S. division — Smartmatic USA — and installed an American president. And after it won the Los Angeles County contract, it opened an office in California and hired local workers to help build the VSAP system.

But security experts are still concerned about the company’s foreign involvement in light of the security issues uncovered by the state’s testers and the county’s failure to disclose the source code for public scrutiny. They’re also concerned that the Los Angeles County system, if it proves successful, will be adopted elsewhere in the country.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/03/los-angeles-county-voting-experiment-119157

Just think of the potential lines of code in these voting systems they likely all share.  From a tech prospective, it's dizzying.

Internet Voting?  What could go wrong?  Mail in ballots on steroids.

In 2014, Smartmatic entered into a strategic partnership with the Estonian R&D lab entitled Cybernetica. Together, the companies announced the development of the Smartmatic-Cybernetica Centre for Excellence for Internet Voting, which is an R&D center in Estonia focused on the study and development of the most efficient and secure forms of Internet voting.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/voting-technology-companies-u-histories-133000242.html