Twenty years ago the intelligence services looked at a voting-machine company founded by Venezuelan engineers, tied to the government in Caracas, and newly in possession of an American equipment firm, and called the arrangement a national security threat. Washington forced the company to sell the American firm. This summer the same file was declassified. It says Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro spent years trying to bend electronic counts, including on that company’s machines, and that they were interested in doing it beyond their own borders. Los Angeles County has just written the company another check for the November election. Ask how those two facts sit together and you will be told you are inventing things.
What the 2006 file actually said
Smartmatic was a small firm with no election record until the Venezuelan government handed it the machines for the August 2004 recall vote on Chávez. The contract was worth about $91 million. Chávez survived by a wide official margin. The opposition cried fraud. No court ever produced the decisive proof of a rigged electronic count. The smell did not leave.
In 2005 the company bought Sequoia Voting Systems, a California firm whose machines were already in American counties. A New York congresswoman, a Democrat, wrote the Treasury and asked who owned the buyer. The ownership ran through offshore companies and foreign trusts. She said the government ought to know who owns the machines that count American votes.
In 2006 the intelligence community answered. A National Intelligence Council assessment rated Smartmatic’s purchase of Sequoia a moderate overall threat to American national security. The grounds were specific. Intelligence that Chávez meant to influence American politics and opinion. Reporting that Caracas had manipulated its own national elections with the company’s direct involvement. Word that directors of the firm held credentials from Venezuelan intelligence. Open reporting of corrupt ties between the company and Venezuelan officials. And the reach: contracts, at the time, in roughly 400 American counties.
The assessment’s conclusion was blunt. The company’s susceptibility to manipulation by the Venezuelan government made the acquisition a potential instrument for officials in Caracas who wanted to undermine confidence in American elections, or to manipulate them. That finding produced a result. The foreign-investment review moved, and in 2007 the government forced Smartmatic to divest Sequoia.
The same file had a second sentence, and it is the one that gets dropped. Analysts judged that neither the company nor the Venezuelan government had the control or the access required to manipulate an election outside Venezuela in a predictable way. A threat is not a completed act. The 2006 paper found intent, a domestic record, and a door. It did not find a flipped American county.
They called you a conspiracy theorist. Then they released the paper that blows up their own story.
The CIA just released a document that contradicts the CIA. Their own file on Venezuela and Smartmatic.
Their own file called Smartmatic a U.S. national-security threat in 2006. It said Chávez wanted to stop a sitting American president. It described a 2012 Venezuela rigging plan: targeted machines, a set margin, built to beat an audit. The CIA’s source reported Chavez “congratulated” the team for rigging the election with the previously set margin. Then the CIA wrote “no large-scale fraud” next to it.
Eleven years later, Smartmatic showed up in the U.S. to build L.A. County’s system for $282M — America’s largest election jurisdiction — just in time for the 2020 election. Now its executives are federally charged with bribery and money laundering on that contract.
And we are the conspiracy theorists?? 🫨🤯
1/2
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) October 2, 2026
What the new paper adds about Maduro
On July 16 the president declassified a June 29 Central Intelligence Agency note summarizing reporting from 2004 to 2020. It says Venezuelan officials developed a sustained interest, and likely some capability, in manipulating electronic voting systems, including this company’s technology, to shape outcomes inside Venezuela. It says Chávez’s intelligence services worked with the election council and the company on plans to alter results with preprogrammed machines. It says machines in Venezuela were described as able to change tallies, to notice when they were being audited, and to print a receipt without recording the vote.
Maduro is in the note as the successor who kept the interest. The reporting says both men wanted the capability at home and, potentially, in other countries. A specific plot to produce a large number for the Maduro government inside Venezuela is what the president cited when he released the papers. The note also says there was no definitive evidence of large-scale electronic fraud even in Venezuela, and it repeats the old limit: no capability, in the analysts’ judgment, to rig an election outside that country.
The company has its own chapter in the same file. It quit Venezuela in 2018 after accusing Maduro’s government of inflating turnout by more than a million votes in a 2017 legislative election. A firm can build the tool, leave the country, and still be the name on the old assessment. Both of those things are in the paper.
Where the machines are now
The American footprint is smaller than the 2006 map, and it is not zero.
In 2020 the company’s equipment was in one jurisdiction: Los Angeles County, as the manufacturer and integrator of the county’s own voting system. Courts that have looked at the claim of a stolen national election have said that footprint could not have moved the presidential result. A judge wrote last year that it was mathematically impossible for those ballot-marking devices to have changed the 2020 outcome. The company says years of audits and examinations have produced no credible evidence that its code changed American votes. That is the record on 2020. It is not a certificate of innocence for the Venezuelan years, and it is not a reason to stop reading the 2006 assessment.
The county has not walked away. In June it issued a $4.78 million work order to the company’s American arm for software development and support on the next version of that system, covering the November 2026 election. In November 2025 the company’s VSR1 2.1 system was one of only two voting systems in the country certified to the new federal standard. California has the same system in its certification queue as of the first of this month. A firm that was forced out of an American equipment company in 2007 is now one of two vendors cleared for the next generation of machines, and the largest county in the country is paying it to be ready for Tuesday’s election a month from now.
VENEZUELA: Trump just posted a video on Dominion voting machine fraud. Coincidence, or timing? A Venezuelan military intelligence whistleblower says the CIA outsourced election rigging tech like Smartmatic and Dominion from Venezuela. https://t.co/Hxo0zpqtEO
— @amuse (@amuse) January 4, 2026
The name they use for the question
The 2020 argument jumped the evidence. A single county’s ballot-marking devices did not swing fifty states. Lawsuits followed, and several outlets retreated from the wider claim. That retreat is now used as a lid on the older file. The intelligence assessment, the forced sale, the Maloney letter, and the declassified note are treated as the same rumor as a late-night monologue about a stolen race.
They are not the same document. One is a claim about November 2020 that the precincts do not support. The other is a 2006 finding, by the government’s own reviewers, that a Venezuelan-tied vendor with a domestic manipulation record had bought its way into American counties, and that Caracas had the intent to use whatever access it could get. Maduro inherited the project. The analysts’ limit, that they could not do it predictably from abroad, is part of the file. So is the interest in trying.
Calling the question a conspiracy theory saves a procurement office from explaining the work order. It does not amend the assessment.
What happens next
Los Angeles will vote on the system it just paid to update. The new federal certification means other counties can buy the same family of machines without waiting on a one-off county build. That is the commercial path, and it is open.
The political path runs through the declassified note. The administration has already read it as proof of a foreign plot against American counts. The note itself is narrower: capability and intent inside Venezuela, interest beyond it, no demonstrated ability to swing a foreign election at will, and a company that later broke with Maduro and accused him of inflating a count. Investigators who want the stronger case will have to produce access, a changed tally, and a county, not a twenty-year-old rating. The company will answer with the 2018 break, the divestiture, and the court orders.
Neither answer retires the other. A government that forced a sale in 2007 because the ownership was a threat has a county renewing the contract in 2026 because the vendor is certified. The machines will be used on November 3. The file will still say what it said in 2006. The only thing that has changed is who is allowed to quote it.
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