Does a Spanish Company Control American Elections?
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

If this story were true, the American people would have much to fear from the prospect that suffrage — this “fundamental article of republican government” — has been sold by the sitting President to an overseas firm whose management is under the influence of a man whose motives and allegiances are inimical to the perpetuation of the principles of liberty upon which this nation was founded.

Before investigating the veracity of the various allegations made by these websites, it is appropriate to rehearse the story as it is being presented. This is a startling synopsis of the situation as published by Canada Free Press:

In January 2012 a [then] quiet deal was struck between SOE Software (then the leading US vote tabulation company) [which was purchased by Scytl]. Scytl is said to be strongly linked to George Soros. The Obama syndicate members arranged the deal and Obama’s now wholly-owned rubber-stamp Congress agreed to it. That’s right. A foreign company may now, ostensibly and unconstitutionally, determine who wins US “elections.” Of extreme interest, Scytl’s CEO, Pere Valles, was the former VP and CFO of GlobalNet whose headquarters were based in Obama’s then base of operations Chicago. Although apparently scrubbed from Obama’s donor list (as so many negative and potentially negative-to-Obama documents and videos have been), Valles is said to have contributed heavily to Obama’s first presidential run. 

Despite the earnestness of the reporting done for the Canada Free Press (and other outlets, as well), there is no easy method of separating the provable from the unprovable, unfortunately. Nonetheless, given the gravity of the issue, this distinction is a worthwhile endeavor. To that end, below is presented our best effort at accuracy in reporting on this timely matter.

First, there is no identifiable evidence that George Soros has an ownership stake in Scytl. The ties between Soros and Scytl seem weaker than are being reported. That is not to say, however, that no relationship will ever be uncovered. Soros has his fingers in nearly every Progressive pie, and in a story entitled “Geneva Gnome’s Global Dread," Arnaud de Borchgrave, the editor-at-large of the Washington Times and United Press International, identified the various golden Rothschild threads woven into the globalist tapestry held up as an ensign by Soros.

Next, the assertion that President Obama or some agent of his administration has “sold the elections” to a foreign entity is difficult to prove as the Constitution clearly leaves with the states the power to manage and monitor elections. State and local election boards would be responsible for entering into contracts with companies providing tabulation equipment and software. 

If by some means (e.g., intimidation by the Federal Election Commission) the federal government were to wrest constructive control over the vote-counting process from the states, that would certainly represent a major constitutional violation and a drastic departure from the timeless principles of republicanism upon which our nation is built.

That said, however, there have been states and localities that have contracted with Scytl in recent years.

For example, the state of Florida was using Scytl to tabulate election results, but later rescinded the contract after uncovering evidence of significant risks in the methods the Barcelona-based company was employing.

According to the report issued by the Florida Department of State:

Our findings identified vulnerabilities that, in the worst case, could result in (i) voters being unable to cast votes, (ii) an election result that does not accurately reflect the will of the voters, or (iii) disclosure of confidential information, such as the votes cast by a voter.

Then in 2010, the Scytl system in use in Washington, D.C. was hacked. As part of an effort to determine the reliability of the devices, the D.C. Board of Elections & Ethics reportedly “encouraged outside parties to hack and find flaws in its new online balloting system.” Answering the challenge, students from the University of Michigan successfully violated the site and programmed it to play the University of Michigan fight song every time a vote was cast.

Why should this alarm Americans who don’t live in those jurisdictions? Chiefly because during the midterm elections in November 2010, Scytl was contracted by 14 states to “modernize” their voting apparatuses. 

During that election cycle (midterm 2010) the following states used Scytl’s technology in tabulating votes: New York, Texas, Washington, California, Florida, Alabama, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nebraska, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Furthermore, Voter Action, an election integrity advocacy group, filed a complaint with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in April 2010 alleging that the use of Scytl’s systems in the voting process “raises national security concerns.”

“Foreign governments may also seek to undermine the national security interests of the United States, either directly or through other organizations,” the complaint claimed.

In support of this last assertion, the complaint reveals that Scytl was formed in 2001 as the result of work done by a research group at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, work which was financed in large part by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

Such associations are certainly worth examining very closely before control of our elections is handed over to Scytl. Especially in light of Scytl’s practice of downloading the votes from each precinct where its devices are in use to a company-owned server where they will be stored. Once the votes are collected, counted, and collated by Scytl and saved on its own proprietary servers, it would be nearly impossible to track any discrepancies between the numbers it reports and the actually vote tallies as taken at the local polling places.

Finally, there is the statement made in many of these stories posted on the Internet that the owner of Scytl is a major donor to the Obama campaign. There is credible evidence that Pere Valles, the current CEO of Scytl, made the maximum legal donation to the Obama presidential campaign in 2008. This is not so surprising considering Valles' ties to Obama’s hometown of Chicago as is disclosed in Valles' résumé posted on the Scytl website:

Mr. Valles joined Scytl in March 2004 after spending most of his professional career in the United States. Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. Valles was Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer of GlobalNet, a NASDAQ publicly-traded telecommunications company headquartered in Chicago.

While the outlook may not be quite as dire as some outlets have reported, there is certainly enough smoke in this story to validate an investigative search for a fire among the connections and contracts relating to Scytl that could potentially consume the sanctity of the votes cast in the November elections.