Venezuelan Interest In U.S. Voting Software 337
A number of readers wrote in about a U.S. federal investigation into the Venezulean ownership of Sequoia Voting Systems, which makes voting machines used in 17 states and the District of Columbia. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States wonders whether the anti-U.S. government of Hugo Chávez could be trying to influence the U.S. midterm elections. From the article: "Government officials familiar with the Smartmatic inquiry said they doubted that even if the Chávez government was some kind of secret partner in the company, it would try to influence elections in the United States. But some of them speculated that the purchase of Sequoia could help Smartmatic sell its products in Latin America and other developing countries, where safeguards against fraud are weaker."
Oh fucking please (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that supposed to be a joke?
Only in America (Score:5, Insightful)
Hold on a second (Score:5, Insightful)
Though a move to open systems would help with either.
What about investigating Diebold? (Score:3, Insightful)
Implicit Admission of Inherent Security Flaws? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh fucking please (Score:3, Insightful)
You've ignored the possibility that Chavez actually despises the actions of the Bush regime and genuinely would like to see a better US foreign policy.
Not everyone is solely interested in power.
Funny.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Election fixing (Score:3, Insightful)
[url:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Voting_
I suspect that he realizes that George has done the same here,
and is basically doing the same to get George out, because he
believes George to be the Devil, or at least a reasonable facimile.
These machines have the same problems as Diebold, and a few of their own.
DRE, just like the Accuvote machines, small difficult to read typeface, and so on.
[url:www.votersunite.org/info/CorrectingSequoia.p
All the noise going on here about it could be motivated by "certain interested parties",
to do a number of things, such as:
distract the public towards a different manufacturer, taking the pressure off of Diebold,
Throw more bad press at Chavez,
and attack the Sequoia machines because they present a perceived threat to their regional
control given by Diebold and other voting machines.
Re:Only in America (Score:2, Insightful)
If we were to further research the matter I think we would quickly discover that the top of most corporate hierarchy's are right leaning in that they represent the interest of concentrated power outside democratic control. Self interest/self preservation make corporations lean to the right by what I would consider traditional definitions of right and left, but maybe your running on different metaphors and or language syntax.
Re:Only in America (Score:2, Insightful)
"He's a left-wing hippy pot-smoking democrat !"
God when will you people stop with the partisanship, and start focusing on the issues which actually matter !
Face it, there's morons on both sides of the fence. Politics is not an epic battle between the forces of good and evil ! It would be easier for things to be so clear cut, but in reality life is a million different shades of gray.
So when you vote in november, just try to elect the person who seems to make the most sense and represents what you stand for as a human being, AFTER having heard their ideas/platforms/etc. And heck, if both turn out to be the wrong choice for you, vote independent ! Its only a wasted vote if you don't show up !
Re:Oh fucking please (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow... and all of those accusations have occured in the local Venezuelan press? That's pretty cool, considering we've got US pundits trying to claim that Chavez is censoring the press [washingtonpost.com].
I don't know much about it myself, but one of those silly leftist writers, Tariq Ali [democracynow.org], is going around saying things like this about Chavez:
Re:Ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)