Monday, December 07, 2009

Boyd versus Smartmatic: tracking down tools for fraud

Alek Boyd has become an investigative journalist now, with some interesting initial success. I saw him in a Mexican paper so I wrote him to let us know what he is up to. His replies follow.
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The world is becoming a small place for the bolibourgeoisie. Some months ago, I was contacted by concerned Filipinos. The reason? Smartmatic had just won $150 million contract to automatize elections in that country, and people doing research about the company came across investigations of mine, published in Vcrisis.com years ago. So they got in touch, wanting to learn more about Hugo Chavez's e-voting firm. Some of my writings even got to the offices of the Director-General, National Computer Center (NCC) of the Philippines, and concurrently Commissioner with Commission on Information and Communications Technology.

Then it came Mexico, where Smartmatic has just won a bid worth some $23 million, to provide biometric technology that will be used to produce cedulas [ID cards]. Understandably, just the hint of a connection to Hugo Chavez make the charros go mad, and so they too got in touch to request for information. Thus far I have been interviewed a couple of times about the issue, and my investigations are part of the evidence that Mexican companies are using to legally challenge the decision of granting such a contract to Smartmatic, specially, taking into consideration that the company has never been contracted anywhere for the provision of such technology/services, and keeps misrepresenting itself, its activities, its dodgy past, etc. As I wrote yesterday, it is Smartmatic's PR disaster.

Alek Boyd

He also sent those links that I arranged as follows:

Interview in Excelsior; and another one.

And the consequences as the PRI, and the PRD demand that the contract is revoked.

Not to mention the complaints of the losing bids.

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