Inviting Vintage

From Mary Fanning. Journalist
🚨🚨BREAKING: Newly declassified CIA documents reveal that a foreign regime developed a plan to rig an election with tampered voting machines. The company involved went on to win a quarter-billion-dollar contract to build election equipment for the largest voting jurisdiction in America!🚨🚨

The White House released the CIA memo late last week. Writer Sofia Karstens broke down the document on Substack, and the details deserve every American’s attention.

Start in 2006. That year, a National Security Council threat assessment rated Smartmatic’s purchase of Sequoia, an American voting systems company, a “moderate overall threat to US national security interests.”

The finding rested on intelligence that Venezuela intended to influence American politics and had already manipulated its own elections. Federal reviewers forced Smartmatic to sell Sequoia by 2007.
Now jump to 2012.

The memo describes intelligence reporting that Hugo Chavez’s spy services worked with Venezuela’s electoral council and Smartmatic on a specific plan to rig his reelection.

Altered machines would go into roughly 300 voting centers in pro-Chavez strongholds to manufacture a margin of about 1.5 million votes.

Chavez won by about 1.6 million.

Sources told the CIA he congratulated his team afterward for “successfully implementing” the plan.

The memo goes further.

Reporting from September 2020 described a technique using parallel “virtual machines” that would copy legitimate vote data, swap in manipulated results, and pass a standard audit without detection.

Then in 2018, Los Angeles County handed Smartmatic a contract worth up to $282 million to build the ballot-marking system for the largest election jurisdiction in America.

That system was up and running for the 2020 election. Today, Smartmatic and several former executives, including a co-founder, sit under federal indictment in Florida on bribery and money laundering charges.

Prosecutors allege the company overbilled Los Angeles County and funneled the extra money into a slush fund.

Smartmatic is only half the story. Karstens also lays out the record on Konnech, a Michigan company that manages poll worker data for election offices across the country, including Los Angeles County. In October 2022, the LA County District Attorney arrested Konnech’s CEO.

County investigators alleged the company stored American poll workers’ personal information on servers in China, in violation of its contract. One month later, the DA’s office dropped the charges, citing potential bias in the investigation.

It never said whose bias, and it never resolved whether the allegations were true. In 2024, the county paid Konnech a $5 million settlement over the prosecution.

Through all of it, Konnech kept its government contracts. Outside reporting, including a Blaze Media review of domain records, has also tied Konnech’s CEO to a Chinese firm that builds election technology for China’s national legislature.

An arrest, dropped charges with no answers, a taxpayer-funded settlement, and unbroken contracts. That sequence should trouble anyone who cares about how our elections are run.

Karstens also points to a third vendor.

Her piece cites internal Dominion Voting Systems emails from spring 2020 that she says show company personnel, including then-director of product strategy and security Eric Coomer, senior systems manager Ronald Morales, and operations executive Nicole Nollette, coordinating remote VPN access into two county election networks.

She reports the emails found two-factor authentication “not possible” on either network at the time, describe a shared virtual machine built for remote access, and reference credentials stored in a shared file.

Her conclusion is that the correspondence shows loose vendor access practices in the run-up to a presidential election. Readers can weigh her analysis for themselves.

One more thing should bother every American, whatever your politics. The same CIA memo that lays out the 2012 rigging plan also declares, twice, that “large-scale electronic fraud did not occur.”

What evidence supports that conclusion? Polling numbers, government spending, and the opposition’s concession.

There is no forensic examination of the machines anywhere in the reasoning.

The CIA’s own internal review from 2013 admitted “limited insight into key elements of the electronic voting system.”

The memo’s scope note concedes it covers only “select” intelligence documents from those sixteen years.

A document that details a rigging plan on one page and rules out fraud a few pages later has some explaining to do. So does an agency still holding back the rest of the file.

Americans deserve the full record. Congress should demand release of the remaining classified reporting.

Every state should keep building the safeguards that make manipulation hard: paper ballots, real audits, and full transparency about who builds and services our election equipment.

Trust in elections is earned with evidence.

The government holding that evidence should show all of it.