Here’s link show that, indeed, Hugo Chavez used machines with Oakland links

Damned !!

I was right !!

Here’s Wiki slab with the direct ties from Hugo Chavez’s ‘Upset’ Election Win and Sequoia Voting with an office in Oakland and those were probably the people I was either talking to or eaves-dropping on at that Gonzalez party.

Note that all the machines kept same Optic Scanner thingee and had keys that bypassed all Security and left no tract.

In 1984, Sequoia purchased the voting machine business of AVM Corporation (the former Automatic Voting Machine Corporation) and was reorganized as Sequoia Voting Systems. AVM had its roots in a number of voting machine companies founded in the 1890s, but by the 1980s, most of its business was in other fields. Nonetheless, in the late 1950s, AVM had begun investing in the development of electronic voting machines.[6] By the time Sequoia bought the AVM voting business, the AVM Automatic Voting Computer (AVC) was ready for market. Under Sequoia ownership, the AVC was certified for use in several states in 1986 and 1987, and with sleek new packaging, it went to market as the Sequoia AVC Advantage DRE voting machine in 1990.[7]Business Week considered the AVC Advantage to be one of the high points in industrial design for the decade of the 1990s and credited it with turning the company around.[8]

An Optech Eagle voting machine made after Sequoia Voting Systems obtained the rights from Business Records Corporation..

In late 1997, Sequoia obtained the intellectual property rights to the Optech line of ballot scanners from Business Records Corporation. This transfer was a consequence of antitrust action taken by the United States Department of Justice when American Information Systems merged with the Election Services Division of Business Records Corporation to form Election Systems & Software. After this merger ES&S retained the right to sell and service Optech scanners to existing customers; as a result, the ES&S Optech IV-C and the Sequoia Optech 400-C, for example, are essentially the same device.[9][10]

In early 2002 De La Rue, a British currency paper printing and security company took over ownership from Smurfit for $23 million.[11] After losing money for several years, on March 8, 2005, Sequoia was acquired by Smartmatic, a multi-national technology company founded by three Venezuelan software engineers, which had developed advanced election systems, including voting machines. Smartmatic machines and software were used in the 2004 Venezuelan recall referendum, which resulted in two studies, an exit poll[12] and cluster analysis,[13] indicating "massive fraud" that flipped the result in favor of dictator Hugo Chávez.

In November 2007, following a verdict by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Smartmatic was ordered to sell Sequoia, which it did to its Sequoia managers having U.S. citizenship.[14]

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