By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
A 30-year US Navy and CIA veteran Gary Bernsten has blown the whistle on highly suspicious activities involving electronic vote counting companies worldwide.
In 2020 Cairns News reported on the IT bomb dropped by Sky News presenter Peta Credlin, revealing the Queensland Electoral Commission and its election contractor Konnech, had outsourced its election coding to China.
This gave the Chinese Communist Party access to the electoral roll and revealing the 1,826,613, names, addresses and dates of birth of Queensland residents. In 2022 the US news site Gateway Pundit reported members of the US voting watch group True the Vote also uncovered evidence that the US-based Konnech was storing election-related data on servers in China.
In 2022, Californian authorities issued an arrest warrant for Konnech CEO Eugene Yu, on charges of stealing personal data. The charges were later dropped, but investigators did find information stored on servers in China, the district attorney’s office said. Konnech previously denied that.
The concerns over international election companies has not gone away – particularly with Queensland going to the polls again and the US election. Bernsten says Smartmatic (which operates in Australia) built an election machine plant just outside of Beijing and ships the hardware to a warehouse in Taiwan where it is marked “Made in Taiwan” in order to bypass US law.
Bernsten says this hardware is then shipped to the US for use by both Smartmatic and Dominion in US elections and he and associates have evidence and witnesses that the source codes for the machines of both companies and others are owned by the Venezuelan Cartel del Sol aka the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro.
In 2020 the US Office of Public Affairs announced that Maduro and 14 current and former Venezuelan officials were charged with narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other criminal charges.
Bernsten says Dominion, which operates in all the key US swing states, has moved its servers and R&D department to Belgrade, Serbia. “In the Belgrade office Venezuelan, Serbian and Chinese software engineers maintain system administrator status over swing state elections and alter elections as directed by the Cartel del Sol, the Cuban DGI and the Chinese CCP,” Bernsten claims.
He says the facility and its personnel are protected by Serbia’s counter-intelligence service. Swing state voter information is held on Huawei servers which are linked to other Huawei servers in Hong Kong. Huawei has been officially identified by US authorities as a threat to national security.
Bernsten also notes that last August three current and former executives of Smartmatic were indicted in Florida in relation to bribery in the 2016 election in the Philippines. One of them was Roger Pinate, one of the three founders and current president of Smartmatic who has been released on bail of $8.5 million.
Bernsten says the public will soon learn that the bribery was not paid to win a contract, but to alter election results. But Bernsten says he and his associates have the source code owned by the Venezuelan CNE (Consejo Nationale Electoral electoral commission) – the source code employed by Smartmatic, Dominion and others – and it will be surrendered to authorities in due course.
Bernsten said the full details of his investigation were shown to an FBI agent in Washington two years ago, and the agent warned him and his associates to flee the city because the agency would actively work to destroy their efforts and seek ways to prosecute them.
The information was subsequently shown to the US Attorney who promised to forward it to the Office of Public Integrity at the Department of Justice. The attorney followed up some months later but Bernsten and his investigators said they were never contacted by the Office of Public Integrity.
Bernsten says Smartmatic and Dominion and the mainstream media will claim that defamation settlements with Fox News and Newsmax prove their innocence, but he and his attorneys briefed Fox News’ trial attorneys but Fox News corporate directors refused to be briefed directly for the case because “they wanted plausible deniability”.
“Fox News corporate knew we had significant evidence and more importantly, witnesses. When all the facts are known, Fox News executives and board will have to explain why they went down on their knees for enemies of the US,” he said.
“We briefed NewsMax’s corporate attorney as well. Though their settlement with Smartmatic is not public, any settlement with that company and their masters, the Cartel del Sol, the (Cuban) DGI and CCP makes it more difficult for those of us trying to defend the country and our democracy.”
Bernsten urged everyone to go to his website stolenelectionsfacts.com where articles and original source documents can be found supporting his claim that Smartmatic and Dominion are employing a source code created and owned by the Venezuelan regime with hardware manufactured in China that can alter election results.
He also referred to Ralph Pezzulo’s book “Stolen Elections: The Plot to Destroy Democracy” which is about to be released and is based on Pezzulo’s interviews with Bernsten, his associates and several key witnesses.
Patrick Colbeck, US author of “The 2020 Coup: What Happened and What We Can Do” says all of his sources indicate that both Bernsten and the information he shares “is legit”. “One of my trusted confidants has even seen the evidence,” he posted on X.
Colbeck says that as a minimum, this information should provide significant exculpatory evidence in support of lawsuits against his “fellow election meddlers” such as Tina Peters, Mike Lindell, Stefanie Lambert, Patrick Byrnes, Sidney Powell and others.
“The endgame, however, needs to be the elimination of electronic voting systems and a return to the hand count of paper ballots on a single election day by voters whose identity has been confirmed with a photo ID.”
Bernsten’s 16-minute video (above) outlines his findings from a multi-year CIA investigation following the September 11, 2001 attacks and ending up in South America investigating narco-terrorist organisations.
Bernsten said that six years ago, he and a business associate, working with the Department of Justice, the FBI, DEA and Homeland Security, started investigating what he calls the largest transnational criminal organisation on the the planet – Cartel del Sol or Cartel of the Sun.
“Cartel del Sol is the Venezuelan government and is led by Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro,” Bernsten said. He went on to name Maduro’s Minister of Defence and President of the National Assembly as key operatives of the cartel along with the former Director of Military Counter-Intelligence, Hugo Carvajal, who in 2023 was extradited from Spain to the US to face a drug trafficking charge.
In 2020 the US Department of Justice offered a bounty of $US15 million for Maduro’s capture, alleging that he “and (at least six) other high ranking Venezuelan officials allegedly partnered with the FARC to use cocaine as a weapon to “flood” the United States”. FARC is the Colombian Marxist guerilla movement.
“In the last 20 years the Cartel del Sol has stolen US$1 trillion from Venezuela’s national oil company Pedevesa and embezzled $US500 billion from its National Treasury,” said Bernsten. “It not only has, but continues to produce and smuggle 25 to 40 metric tonnes of cocaine every month out of its country to the world.”
Bernsten said the Cartel del Sol is a $US2 trillion transnational criminal organisation “and the most well-resourced criminal syndicate in history”.
Cairns News notes that the Biden administration and the DoJ have been strangely silent on this cartel and its operations in recent years. The major news item on Maduro this year was him “winning” his third six-year term as president, a win widely condemned by Venezuelan opposition parties as rigged.
Global media has reported this, but the same global media relentlessly tells us that Donald Trump made “false, baseless claims” of vote rigging by the US Democratic Party.
CNN’s coverage of the election only made passing mention of Maduro’s US charges of drug trafficking and corruption well down the story in the 18th paragraph. They also fail to mention the facts around Venezuela’s links to electronic election companies.
Bernsten says Venezuela, through its corrupt dealings, controls a dozen countries and their leaders and has “massive investments in American and European financial markets and institutions”.
And here’s the rub: “As we conducted investigations against the Cartel del Sol and presented them one after another to the US Department of Justice, we noticed and pursued leads from the cartel’s money laundering operations leading to the world non-government organisations and election companies.”
Bernsten says that after witnessing irregularities with the US 2020 presidential election, he and his investigators decided to direct resources and time to Cartel del Sol links to US and global election fraud.
“After a three-and-a-half year investigation it is indisputable that Smartmatic Election Systems was created at the direction of now-deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and its source code, the basis of its operating system, developed jointly by Venezuela’s Consejo Nationale Electoral (electoral commission) and Smartmatic, was designed to allow election results to be altered without the knowledge of voters and the public.”
Bernsten said Venezuela’s Consejo Electoral (CNE) holds Smartmatic’s source code. “Each time the Venezuelan CNE and Smartmatic update the source code a copy of it is stored at the vault at the Venezuelan Central Bank,” he said.
“In 2005 the European Commission Election Observation Commission to Venezuela published a report stating ‘the Venezuelan regime owns Smartmatic source code’. The Venezuelan government signed that report as factual.”
Bernsten said Smartmatic’s first Venezuelan election was the 2003 recall election for Hugo Chavez. He detailed the names of three Venezuelan graduate computer engineer graduates hired by the CNE to form Smartmatic. They already had an IT company registered in Delaware.
Bernsten said these engineers flew off to Italy to purchase Olivetti lottery machines to serve as the election hardware. Chavez won the nearby election. “Secure in power, President Chavez decided to weaponize this capability beyond his border,” he said.
Smartmatic entered its first US election for the Cook County, Illinois, and the state of New Jersey, for Democratic Party primary election races in 2006. In 2005 Smartmatic purchased the long-standing US election company Sequoia Voting Systems Inc with its 22% share of the US electoral market.
Some 18 months later the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) conducted an investigation into Smartmatic because of its links to Venezuela. Bernsten said Smartmatic immediately put its source code in the Sequoia machines and attempted to conceal its Venezuelan ownership by hiring former US Naval officer Jack Blaine to set up a holding company (SVS Holding) to place its ownership in stock.
Then in 2006 Smartmatic entered into an agreement with CFIUS to sell Sequoia in six months. Antonio Mugica, one of the original owners of Smartmatic, arranged for a then small election company in Toronto Canada, Dominion Election Systems, to purchase Sequoia and inherit a licence agreement for Smartmatic’s source code, the code owned by the Venezuelan cartel.
The agreement signed by these two companies gave Dominion the American market and Smartmatic the global market. We note that Smartmatic currently operates in Australia after being first deployed in NSW, providing a voter identification system in 2023.
Bernsten says the CNE building in Caracas is occupied by some 100 computer engineers, half for Smartmatic and half for CNE, working side by side. “Their efforts for more than a decade was to perfect the techniques of altering elections and defeating audit.”
Bernsten says in 2018 Smartmatic, publicly and with the approval of the Venezuelan regime, broke with the regime because the CNE’s election theft that year was so egregious.
He says the techniques of the source code and machine can alter and conceal the results of an election when the spread between candidates is up to 3 to 5 percentage points, but if there is significant turnout against it, it can be defeated.
He says the machines could not conceal the massive spread in the recent Venezuelan elections, which were blatantly stolen. In Smartmatic’s place was a company called ExCle from Argentina, which allowed Smartmatic to exit Venezuela for the global market.