Caracas Chonicles offers further thoughts on why many Venezuelans will suspect fraud even after Jimmy Carter declares that his “audit” has confirmed the chavista referendum victory:
[E]ven if the auditoria en frio (after-the-fact audit) says CNE had it right, many in the opposition will not accept it. Why? Because the “cuerpo del delito” – the ballot papers – have been in the hands of stooges of the main suspect – the Chavez-controlled military – since Sunday night.
The fact is that the *only* procedure that could’ve settled this question definitively and beyond any shadow of a doubt was an on-the-spot audit – the so-called auditoria en caliente. If CNE had agreed to open the ballot boxes on Sunday night, five minutes after the last vote was cast, publicly, in a statistically valid random sample of voting centers, in front of poll workers, witnesses from both sides and international observers, counted the physicial ballots and matched them to the electronic tally, then, then – there would be no room for doubt at all. This, after all, is what the Smartmatic machines were designed for, the whole reason they produce a papervote. . . .
Now, why was there no on-the-spot audit? The history here is very clear, very straightforward, amply documented. Felipe Mujica and Alberto Quiros Corradi, the opposition’s negotiators at CNE, pushed hard for this kind of check in pre-vote negotiations with CNE. Jorge Rodriguez, acting as CNE’s main negotiator, simply refused, categorically, to even consider any variation on this kind of check.
To my mind, it was JR’s refusal to allow an auditoria en caliente that robbed the country of the possibility of a definitive, authoritative solution to the crisis. Even if there was no fraud, JR killed the only check that could’ve convinced both sides of our terribly polarized, low-trust country that this was so.
In other words, no on-the-spot audit, no closure.
I’ve spent the last two days obsessively considering this question, and I just cannot think of any plausible explanation for JR’s refusal to allow on-the-spot audits that doesn’t involve some kind of hanky panky. I wish I could, but I can’t. Maybe you can help me here.
On-the-spot auditing, according to the burned-by-Diebold US left, is the key requirement to make eVoting trustworthy. On-the-spot auditing is what the Smartmatic machines were built to allow. Why the hell did they buy the machines and then refuse to perform the key checks the machines were designed to allow? It doesn’t add up.
Alas, it “adds up” all too well. Much to my surprise, hardly any North American bloggers seem interested in these developments, perhaps confirming the old saw that people in the United States will do anything for Latin America except pay attention to what’s happening there.
The story so far: A Venezuelan Lesson for Would-Be Dictators
Comments