Smartmatic has been questioned for its ties to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, its major issues during elections, and now its associations with leftists.
Smartmatic is owned by Dominion Voting Systems whose voting machines are used by 30 percent of the country. Its software has ties to the left.
Smartmatic voting machines previously had issues in both Florida and Washington this year due to software failures.
Trump campaign legal team member Sydney Powell told Fox News, "We have sworn witness testimony of why the software was designed. It was designed to rig elections." She added the witness "was fully briefed on it, he saw it happen in other countries, it was exported internationally for profit by the people who are behind Smartmatic and Dominion."
Smartmatic provided the voting machines that were used in the 2004 recall election of Chavez, and that is worrisome to some.
Even Chicago Alderman Edward Burke suggested the company’s equipment might be a conspiracy to destabilize American democracy.
However, Major Scale Technology Management supported the system, saying that it was used in a historically closely watched election.
“Smartmatic, which provided the election machines for the Venezuelan vote, can rightly claim that they have conducted one of the most closely watched, carefully audited, and statistically analyzed elections in recent history,” it wrote in a memo to the Cook County Clerk’s Office, the Tribune reported.
Smartmatic was awarded the $91 million contract for the voting machines in a recall election right before the election occurred.
Aviel Rubin, who was a computer science professor with Johns Hopkins University, questioned why the country was changing its voting systems so soon before the election.
“I’ve never heard of Smartmatic,” Rubin told the Miami Herald in 2004. “I’d be very concerned about an unknown player with that big of a contract, especially in a place like Venezuela, where fraud is such a big concern.”
At the time, the machines were untested. Rubin said the problem with that was that the system could pretend to work all day and then give the wrong information at the end.
In 2006, Sequoia Voting Systems, which is owned by Smartmatic, suffered a big blow when Chicago and Cook County refused to pay invoices because of its major glitches during a March primary.
The results in that election were unknown for several days because there were many problems with the new voting equipment. The county and the city refused to pay the invoices in protest to make sure things would be fixed in time for the November 2006 election.
The city and county claimed that the systems didn’t perform the way they should, but the company disagreed, saying that it was just slow tabulation and that they could make the interface more user-friendly for the November election.
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