It's Over - I'm OUT (Disgraceful: Discredited E-Voting Vendor VP Appointed to U.S. EAC Advisory Panel)

This is the final straw for me (and you just gotta give props for the rewards given for failure by the other side (those are truly golden)). There is no reason for this to happen other than the Great O's unconcern if not outright disdain for those who voted for him specifically to stop the vote stealing. My thanks go to Brad Friedman at the Bradblog for opening the floodgates of my final revulsion. Thanks, Brad. No thanks, Obama.

By the way, a Bachelor's degree in Engineering Technology is one of those made-up degrees given to people who have no technical credentials (and aren't capable of earning any) so that the underlings think their managers (who possess these by magic today) are qualified technically. They aren't. And don't get me started on Phoenix University. As if. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Disgraceful: Discredited E-Voting Vendor VP Appointed to U.S. EAC Advisory Panel Incredible. This would be the equivalent of appointing the sitting Vice President of Exxon Mobil to an EPA advisory committee, but Ed Smith has now been appointed to the disastrous U.S. Election Assistance Commission's (EAC's) Technical Guidelines Development Committee as one of their new "Technical and Scientific Experts."

From the EAC's email announcement on Friday (posted in full at end of article):

Edwin B. Smith, III, vice president of compliance and certification at Dominion Voting Systems. Before joining Dominion Voting Systems, Mr. Smith was vice president of manufacturing, compliance, quality and certification at Sequoia Voting Systems. He also served as the operations manager at Hart InterCivic and the senior director of operations at K*TEC Electronics. He holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Phoenix and a Bachelor of Science in engineering technology from Texas A&M.

"So Smith went from voting machine company Hart Intercivic to voting machine company Sequoia Voting Systems and is now at voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems, where he is a VP, selling e-voting systems to jurisdictions around the country that receive federal money dolled out by the EAC. And now he'll also sit on an advisory board at the EAC helping to advise which one of those companies sees their systems certified for use in U.S. elections by the EAC. Just amazing."

But that's not even half the story of why this is just incredible, and another huge black eye for the EAC. (How many eyes do they have left to blacken at this point?) If you're not a long time reader of The BRAD BLOG reader, and don't recall who this Ed Smith is, read on. It's simply stultifying . . . . Smith is the guy who, after years of paying a crackpot contractor named Mike Gibbons to do this and that for Sequoia with loads of federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) tax-payer cash, assigned him to do an "independent" analysis of Sequoia's touch-screen machines after they failed in NJ's 2008 Super Tuesday election. That was just after Smith had sent a letter threatening two Princeton computer scientists with legal action "to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis," if they performed the actually independent analysis of the machines as they were tasked by NJ election officials to do. (Addtional outrage/irony shortly thereafter uncovered by The BRAD BLOG: Sequoia didn't even own the Intellectual Property rights to the machines in question. Rather, the IP rights were, and are still to our knowledge, owned by Smartmatic, a Venezuelan firm tied to Hugo Chavez. Sequoia lied to both federal investigators and state election officials about that relationship.)

After The BRAD BLOG exposed who Smith's friend Mike Gibbons actually was - a Sequoia insider, as well as a drunk and a philanderer with an obnoxious Facebook page seeking a "well endowed blonde nymphomaniac," only to change the page after we'd outed him to feature a photo of him and George Bush Sr. and a professed love of Jesus Christ instead - Gibbons was fired. (He would be found dead a few months later, the actual cause of which we've never been able to ascertain.)

Smith was severely reprimanded at Sequoia for the embarrassing incident, and has now been rewarded by moving on to Dominion, which is in partnership with his old friends at Sequoia to supply the new, failed e-voting systems recently deployed, disasterously, for the first time in last November's election - the one where the results of the NY-23 Special Election for U.S. House will now forever be in question. The Sequoia/Dominion contract to supply faulty, secret vote counting machines to NY-23 is worth some $20 million federal tax-payer dollars.

And now Smith's been been named to advise the EAC, the actual federal body tasked with overseeing, testing, and approving voting systems for federal approval - the very body that is supposed to oversee the very scams that Smith attempts to pull off with his worthless, broken, easily hacked, often-failed, computerized secret vote-counting systems. And, in the case of the NY systems, they're being used even though they are neither federally nor state certified yet.

This isn't just the Fox in the Hen House. This is the Fox who has already devoured every Hen in the House, in the Hen House. With feathers in his mouth and a sub-machine gun in his hands.

The EAC is an absolute disgrace, and should long ago have been disbanded for one failure after another - including the approval of virtually every e-voting system in use today, virtually every one of which has failed spectacularly, even as the EAC has refused to decertify any of them.

Enough is enough.

Read the press release and much, much more here. Enough is waaaay too much. Suzan ______________________