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   agreeing to sell out to an American company after a barrage of criticism   
   by legislators from both parties who said the administration had not   
   adequately reviewed the deal or informed Congress about its   
   implications.   
      
   The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and   
   the Chávez government have been well known to United States   
   foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which   
   Mr. Chávez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an   
   official margin of nearly 20 percent.   
      
   Opposition leaders asserted that the balloting had been rigged. But a   
   statistical analysis of the distribution of the vote by American experts   
   in electronic voting security showed that the result did not fit the   
   pattern of irregularities that the opposition had claimed.   
      
   At the same time, the official audit of the vote by the Venezuelan   
   election authorities was badly flawed, one of the American experts said.   
   “They did it all wrong,” one of the authors of the study, Avi Rubin, a   
   professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said in an   
   interview.   
      
   Opposition members of Venezuela’s electoral council had also protested   
   that they were excluded from the bidding process in which Smartmatic and   
   a smaller company, the Bizta Corporation, were selected to replace a   
   $120 million system that had been built by Election Systems and Software   
   of Omaha.   
      
   Smartmatic was then a fledgling technology start-up. Its registered   
   address was the Boca Raton, Fla., home of the father of one of the two   
   young Venezuelan engineers who were its principal officers, Antonio   
   Mugica and Alfredo Anzola, and it had a one-room office with a single   
   secretary.   
      
   The company claimed to have only two going ventures, small contracts for   
   secure communications software that a Smartmatic spokesman said had a   
   total value of about $2 million.   
      
   At that point, Bizta amounted to even less. Company documents, first   
   reported in 2004 by The Herald, showed the firm to be virtually dormant   
   until it received the $200,000 investment from a fund controlled by the   
   Venezuelan Finance Ministry, which took a 28 percent stake in return.   
      
   Weeks before Bizta and Smartmatic won the referendum contract, the   
   government also placed a senior official of the Science Ministry, Omar   
   Montilla, on Bizta’s board, alongside Mr. Mugica and Mr. Anzola. Mr.   
   Montilla, The Herald reported, had acted as an adviser to Mr. Chávez on   
   elections technology.   
      
   More recent corporate documents show that before and after Smartmatic’s   
   purchase of Sequoia from a British-owned firm, the company was   
   reorganized in an array of holding companies based in Delaware   
   (Smartmatic International), the Netherlands (Smartmatic International   
   Holding, B.V.), and Curaçao (Smartmatic International Group, N.V.). The   
   firm’s ownership was further shielded in two Curaçao trusts.   
      
   Mr. Stoller, the Smartmatic spokesman, said that the reorganization was   
   done simply to help expand the company’s international operations, and   
   that it had not tried to hide its ownership, which he said was more than   
   75 percent in the hands of Mr. Mugica and his family.   
      
   “No foreign government or entity, including Venezuela, has ever held any   
   stake in Smartmatic,” Mr. Stoller said. “Smartmatic has always been a   
   privately held company, and despite that, we’ve been fully transparent   
   about the ownership of the corporation.”   
      
   Mr. Stoller emphasized that Bizta was a separate company and said the   
   shares the Venezuelan government received in it were “the guarantee for   
   a loan.”   
      
   Mr. Stoller also described concerns about the security of Sequoia’s   
   electronic systems as unfounded, given their certification by federal   
   and state election agencies.   
      
   But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia   
   voting machines were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities.   
   Smartmatic’s new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public   
   hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help   
   with the vote.   
      
   Some problems with the election were later blamed on a software   
   component, which transmits the voting results to a central computer,   
   that was developed in Venezuela.   
      
   --   
   The Starmaker -- To question the unquestionable, ask the unaskable,   
   to think the unthinkable, mention the unmentionable, say the unsayable,   
   and challenge the unchallengeable.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)