Caracas Chronicles presents two contrasting post mortems on the now official and almost certainly unalterable referendum outcome. José Mora declares, “You Can’t Fool All of the People All of the Time” and has no doubt that the Chavez victory was the fruit of fraud. Meanwhile, Francisco Toro, also anti-chavista, gloomily concludes that the official result must be correct, invoking Sherlock Holmes’ dictum, “If you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.” He counts it “impossible” that Jimmy Carter and other international observers could have been hoodwinked by the regime and merely “improbable” that the exit polls could have been wrong by a gigantic margin.
That balancing of improbabilities is questionable. Mr. Carter’s quick endorsement of the announced results – before he and his colleagues could possibly have done any serious auditing – shows that he didn’t want to examine the possibility of fraud in any effective way. The huge divergence between the official count and credible exit polls should have led to immediate steps to secure the ballot boxes against tampering, followed by a prompt, large scale recount. Instead, there was a delayed, limited “cold audit”, and the oddities in the voting machine tallies (discussed in the post just below this one) were brushed aside. All in all, Jimmy Carter, the Carter Center and César Gaviria did not do what needed to be done to detect fraud. Hence, their declarations that the vote count was accurate mean nothing.
On the other side of the equation, the magnitude of the alleged error in the Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates exit survey would be unprecedented in the history of scientific election polling. The sample size – over 20,000 – was very large in relation to the number needed for statistical reliability. Drawing a valid sample isn’t difficult in a country like Venezuela, which has had free elections in the recent past and for which high quality demographic and psephological data are available. The methodology (a questionnaire marked secretly, not an in-person interview) made it extremely difficult for the opinions of the field workers to distort the surveyed voters’ responses. The polling firm is well regarded and has strong business incentives not to make flagrant, highly publicized mistakes. While the government claims that its own exit poll was consistent with the official results, the details of who conducted that poll and how have not, so far as I can determine, been released. Some pre-election polls did show a lead for the pro-Chavez side, but the last of those was apparently taken a couple of weeks beforehand, and large swings of opinion in the final stretch of a campaign are commonplace. (Just ask President Dewey!)
Leaving aside the government’s consistent refusal to set up election procedures that would have minimized the likelihood of irregularities, the mesas with strangely synchronized voting machines and all other suspicious circumstances, the exit polls alone are strong grounds for suspicion, and the international monitors’ feckless conduct has ensured that those suspicions will never be adequately investigated.
Venezuela still has a chance to pull out of its Castroite trajectory. Elections haven’t been abolished, and all power isn’t yet in El Commandante’s hands. The chavistas have taken a long step toward tyranny, but establishing it firmly against the will of the three-fifths of the country will be a challenging task.
The future of Hugo Chavez remains in doubt. What should not be in doubt is the reputation of the Carter Center and its eponym. The only people who can rationally approve of what it did in Venezuela are those who believe that (a) it was vitally important for Chavez to prevail in the referendum and (b) he did not really do so. In the unlikely, though not impossible, event that Chavez won honestly, he should be outraged at the monitors, who have left dark clouds hanging over his head. I suspect, though, that he is highly satisfied with their performance and would be delighted to recommend them to any other dictator in need of legitimization.
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