What’s Happening in US Election Matches What Happened in Venezuela, Expert Says  BY GQ PAN  December 4, 2020 

Updated: December 5, 2020

Irregularities that have taken place in this year’s U.S. presidential election are eerily similar to voting manipulation that helped Hugo Chávez stay in power in 2004, according to a senior former CIA official.

Not to mislead...this is Philadelphia 2020

Election workers count ballots in Philadelphia, Pa., on Nov. 4, 2020. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

He described Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, as a “new kind of dictator.” Upon his taking power, Chávez revised the country’s constitution to increase the presidential term of office from five to six years, but also allowed people to call off his presidency in a referendum, which required 20 percent of signatures of all 11 million voters.

By 2003, opponents of Chávez managed to collect enough signatures to trigger a referendum. “That’s when he started to panic,” the former intelligence official—who is also an expert in Latin American politics and counterterrorism—told The Epoch Times. “So he started talking to a company called Indra, which is a Spanish company that runs elections.”

The technology used by Indra at that time, according to the expert, wasn’t “flexible” enough to do what Chávez wanted to do. He said that the regime then turned to Smartmatic, a company registered in Delaware and founded by three young Venezuelan engineers. After receiving a contract for $150 million to overhaul the country’s election system ahead of the 2004 referendum, Smartmatic bought machines from Italian lottery machine maker Olivetti.

“At midnight on election day the machine stopped counting,” he  said, adding that at that point, Chavez was losing. “By 3 a.m., Chavez had won by 10 percent.”  

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The former CIA official said there were other irregularities that had occurred during the 2004 Venezuelan referendum that also took place in U.S. cities during this year’s election. He pointed to a Nov. 25 hearing in Philadelphia, during which observers testified that the city’s Board of Elections was processing hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots with “zero civilian oversight or observation.”

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