@SidneyPowell1, give this to the lyin' MSM's, conspiracy labeling ' journalists' sorry ass and give them a big F- you. Dan Friedman @dfriedman33 Replying to  @dfriedman33 Trump's lawyers may produce some affidavits about alleged vote rigging in Venezuela, or about allegations Dominion machines COULD be manipulated, but they will never offer evidence for the actual conspiracy theories they alleged today. They can't, because they're lying. https://mobile.twitter.com/dfriedman33/status/1329571187136090115 EXCLUSIVE: On Heels of Diebold/Premier Purchase, Canadian eVoting Firm Dominion Also Acquires Sequoia, Lies About Chavez Ties in Announcement Brad Friedman,Contributor Investigative journalist, blogger, broadcaster 06/22/2010 02:17 PM ET | Updated Dec 06, 2017 Intellectual Property' of voting systems still owned by firm linked to Venezuelan President, despite press statement to the contrary PLUS: The election official/e-voting company revolving 'oversight' door continues to turn... *Canadian-based Dominion Voting Systems has quietly announced its second acquisition of a major U.S. voting machine company in as many months and, right out of the gate, they've lied about it. Not an auspicious beginning for the company which may now, virtually overnight, have become the dominant private e-voting machine company in this country. In our recent breaking coverage detailing the SEC's fraud lawsuits filed against Diebold and a number of their top executives -- including their former Chief Financial Officer who, as we reported exclusively back in 2007, was the top earner from an apparent insider sell-off at the company just days before its stock would plummet from its all-time high on the announcement of spinning off their troubled election division to a "new" company renamed Premier -- we noted that Diebold/Premier's assets had recently been purchased by a small Canadian firm by the name of Dominion Voting.  But Dominion hasn't stopped there. Their purchase of Diebold/Premier's assets was actually made from ES&S, the world's largest voting machine company, who was forced to divest of the assets they'd purchased from Diebold (previously, the second largest voting machine company in the country) for $5 million last year, as part of an anti-trust suit settlement with the DoJ. In our coverage, we noted the comment of Dominion CEO John Poulos who, in the company's press release [PDF] announcing the Diebold/Premier asset acquisition, stated ominously: "We are extremely pleased to conclude this transaction, which...will allow Dominion to expand its capabilities and operational footprint to every corner of the United States." Indeed, the DoJ-scuttled ES&S merger with Diebold/Premier had been legally challenged since, among other reasons, the merger of the largest e-voting company with the country's second largest would have given a single company control of at least 70% of all votes cast in the nation. What we had replaced for length, however, with the ellipses in Poulos' quote above, was this [emphasis added]: "We are extremely pleased to conclude this transaction, which will restore much-needed competition to the American voting systems market and will allow Dominion to expand its capabilities and operational footprint to every corner of the United States." How much is Poulos actually interested in "restor[ing] much-needed competition" for "the American voting systems market"? Apparently not so much, as according to a company press release [PDF] quietly issued late in the afternoon on Friday, June 4th, Dominion has now also acquired what had previously been the third largest voting machine company in the U.S., Sequoia Voting Systems. Not surprisingly, that late Friday announcement didn't say anything at all about "competition". Worse, as The BRAD BLOG has confirmed, the new press release from Dominion simply lied about what the company has and hasn't purchased from Sequoia, a company which had lied themselves, for years, about the real ownership of its proprietary voting systems. America's New E-Voting Goliath Given the enormous share of the U.S. voting "market" now potentially controlled by Dominion -- and the now-customary revolving door between public and private officials in the "election industry" which now places former Diebold/Premier officials, former Sequoia officials, and even former state election officials at the helm of the private, little-known Canadian firm -- it comes as no surprise that Dominion would hope few in the public actually noticed their sudden acquisition of e-voting assets from some 50% of the U.S. "voting market". Prior to ES&S' doomed purchase of Diebold/Premier last September, there were essentially four major election firms divvying up ownership of the U.S. voting market. The very rough breakdown of voting jurisdiction control by those four corporations was as follows: 40% ES&S 30% Diebold/Premier 20% Sequoia 10% Hart Intercivic We're using "very rough" percentages above for a number of reasons. Among them, there are different ways to determine market share here, such as number of jurisdictions vs. number of voters vs. contract worth, etc. Also, many of Diebold's former customers had already determined to move their contracts to ES&S during the long interim while the DoJ dithered following ES&S' initial, now-scuttled, acquisition of Diebold/Premier. As one e-voting industry insider explained to The BRAD BLOG, Dominion purchased the remaining hardware and software assets and potential customer base of Diebold/Premier, but they purchased the actual customer contracts, as well as the hardware and software, in their acquisition of Sequoia. Dominion's spokesperson, formerly of Diebold, formerly the Press Secretary for the Secretary of State of Georgia, the unfortunately named (at least for a voting-machine company spokesman) Chris Riggall, confirmed the insider's take to The BRAD BLOG, responding to our queries by noting Dominion "did not purchase any existing contracts, thus market share," in their agreement to buy the Diebold/Premier assets.  "Under the agreement," Riggall explained via email, "jurisdictions operating Premier equipment are given the choice to either continue their existing relationship with ES&S or assign their old contract to Dominion. It's going to take some time to see how that plays out and what decisions jurisdictions make in regard to their future needs (if any) for support, maintenance, warranties, etc." But no matter how the numbers eventually shake out, Dominion is now a serious power-playing Goliath in the U.S. e-voting industry, and potentially even the biggest kid on the block -- all in a matter of weeks, with virtually nobody in the public or media paying attention, and even fewer seeming to give a damn about what it all means, and what it all actually amounts to. Little wonder their press release on the Sequoia purchase mentioned nothing at all about "competition", just two weeks and change after touting the "restor[ation of] much-needed competition to the American voting systems market" after they'd purchased the assets of Diebold/Premier for $5 million. Just another day in our bought and paid-for, fully privatized system of "public" elections in the world's once-greatest democracy. But wait -- the story gets still worse... Whose IP Is It Anyway? There are a few more points concerning Dominion's purchase of Sequoia worth flagging here for now. The first, and perhaps most disturbing, concerns the following announcement in Dominion's press release upon the purchase of Sequoia [emphasis added]: As part of the transaction, Dominion has acquired Sequoia's inventory and all intellectual property, including software, firmware and hardware, for Sequoia's precinct and central count optical scan and DRE voting solutions, including BPS, WinEDS, Edge, Edge2, Advantage, Insight, InsightPlus and 400C systems. That statement is an out-and-out lie -- one which continues to propagate a years-long deception of the public, the media and election officials by Sequoia themselves. As long time readers of The BRAD BLOG will recall, the matter of the true ownership of the intellectual property (IP) of Sequoia's voting systems wasn't at all what the company had represented to the public, to media, to election official customers, and even in courts of law. As part of a detailed investigative exposé series in 2008, as we broke the story of Hart Intercivic's quietly attempted hostile takeover of Sequoia, we revealed the fact that -- despite representations to the contrary, possibly even to U.S. government investigators -- the IP for the vast-majority/near-entirety of Sequoia's voting systems was actually secretly owned by the Hugo Chavez-tied, Venezuelan-based firm, Smartmatic. https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/620084/amp EXCLUSIVE: Sequoia Voting Systems Threatens Princeton Computer Scientists with Legal Action if they Carry Out NJ Commissioned Analysis of the Company's Touch-Screen Voting Machines https://bradblog.com/?p=5814