Oil Wars

It would appear that the Venezuelan opposition is dead and buried. Their last hope was that the election observers from the European Union and the O.A.S. wouldn´t validate the result. As per the prelimary result released by the E.U. they aren´t going to get their wish.

The report released by the E.U. was critical of the Venezuelan government and electoral authorities in a number of regards:

1) using public funding to help the pro-Chavez campeign

2) low public confidence in the electoral authorities (CNE) based on inappropriate use of lists of people signing petition against the government to punish people.

3) using public resources (public transport, etc.) to help voter turnout.

4) government controlled media being very biased in favor of pro-Chavez candidates (they did note that the private media was very biased against Chavez but argued that government owned media has a greater responsibility to be objective.)

5) the actual process of voting was overly complicated and many people could not do it without the assistance of polling station workers.

6) government functionaries and office holders openly campeigned which is a violation of Venezuelan law.


All of that said though the observers found that the actual carrying out of the vote was very good, met the highest international standards and the final results accurately reflected the vote. They further found that the CNE was accomidating towards opposition parties demands and that they complied with and met all the conditions of the EU observers. Here are some key quotes in this regard:

In the context of lack of confidence and extreme polarization, the EU recognizes the efforts made by the CNE to increase confidence of the political parties in the process. Among those efforts was the auditing of various elements of the automated voting process such as the programing of the voting machins, the fingerprint reading machines, and the vote totalling systems, and the increasing of the vote counting audit to 45% of the votes.

....................................................

The discovery of a fault with the promming of the voting machines, with the resulting remote possibility of violating the secrecy of the vote, was handled by the CNE in an oppertune and adquate manner. The possibility of violating the secrecy of the vote was examined by the EU experts, who considered it remote, and certainly more complicated that in conventional elections. The violating of voting secrecy only could have occured if the sequence of the identity of the voters and the sequence of the actual votes could be reconstructed. Such a reconstruction would have implied that a qualified user had access to three different sources of information. Those sources would be the memory of the voting machines, the memory of the fingerprint reading machines, and the complete key to the code for encryption (which was devided between the political parties and the CNE) used by the system to protect the voting data. The elmination of the fingerprint reading machines was an important measure to re-establish confidence of the political parties. As a consequence it was surprising to the EU that the principal political parties of the opposition withdrew from the elections without giving new reasons.

..............................................................

The use of the electoral resource known as the morochas, which permits the duplication of paties to avoid the subtraction of the seats obtained from the district voting from the list those obtained from the list voting without a doubt violates the spirit of the Constitution, but is techinically permitted by the system of proportional mixed voting created by the Organic Law of Suffrage and Political Participation.

.....................................................................

The security and transparency measure that were introduced in the automated voting process were on a par with the most advanced international practicies.

.....................................................................

The registry of voters (REP) has been the object of a permanent debate and the illegality of some of its entries has been pointed out.... Nevertheless, the political parties had sufficient access to the voting registrey.

.......................................................................

The audit, or manual counting of the voting reciepts, was observed in 75 voting center. Despite the long time to carry out the audit the results clearly indicated the accuracy of the results, with few cases of discrepancies between the number of voters marked down in the voting registry, the number counted by the machine, and the number of voting reciepts counted. The general conclusion of the observers was that the voting machines appeared to be very accurate.

That is all I have the time or enery to translate right now. But the main point is despite the wrist slaps over a number of issues the actual voting process was conducted with adequate safeguards and the results announced are accurate. The observers didn´t see that the opposition had any legitimate reason to pull out of the election.

It is also quite notable that they didn´t even attempt to claim the results were somehow illegitimate due to the opposition not participating. They´re adults who know better than to go along with such infantile assertions.

With this the election of last Sunday passes into history. The pro-Chavez forces now have carte-blanche to govern as they please as the opposition willing abondoned the electoral arena. The only thing left to do is to speculate about what the opposition could possibly have been thinking.
|