Smartmatic, the Venezuelan company that in less than a decade went from obscurity to calling itself a “world-record-setting electoral company,” has secured contracts exceeding $500 million, as mentioned in a press release from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to counter criticisms published on this blog.
In “Metropolitan Transportation Authorities Wants a Change for the Payment Systems,” Smartmatic’s PR team fundamentally hijacked a story—written in Tarzan English—about the development of a new contactless payment system by the MTA. They even invented two spokespersons along the way: Alek Halford and George Boyd. Go ahead, Google Mr. Halford and Mr. Boyd in relation to the story; it’s quite amusing. They added relevant keywords (“telecommunications, technology, system integration, and payment industries, Switzerland, Netherlands, Philippines, and South America”).
The original notice can be read here, while the article linked in Smartmatic’s post makes no mention of Halford or Boyd, nor does the piece on banktech.com that presumably inspired it.
Readers of this site will remember Smartmatic’s previous attempts to silence me: by Luis Acuña here, and more recently by Paul Babic here. Today, I stumbled upon Smartmatic’s foolish online reputation management strategy described earlier. Risking sounding like a broken record, Smartmatic has a significant public relations problem. To this day, it maintains a flawless record of failures: all the electoral processes in which it has participated outside of Venezuela—be it in Belgium or the Philippines—have been marred by allegations of fraud, lack of functionality, corruption, and lack of transparency—see the latest indefinite one here. Crucially, in Venezuela, its lottery machines which were dubbed “the best electoral system in the world” by Jimmy Carter were reviewed—though not properly audited—only once in 2005, when it was revealed that the secrecy of the vote was compromised. In the words of European experts that both Smartmatic and chavismo like to quote:
While the source codes are owned by the CNE, for commercial reasons they are not available for public scrutiny, and no independent third-party audits of the entire electronic voting system have been conducted.