I like numbers, so let’s look at the ones announced by Carrasquero and analyze them. Sumate says they handed in 3,467,050, but right off the bat the CNE says only 3,060,013 were “accepted” so that 407,037 were rejected even before the process began based not on the signatures, not on the data, but on the fact that the cover sheet did not agree with the totals. These people can not go and complain, their signatures are disqualified. There were 39,060 forms which had this problem.
Of the 3,060,013 admitted by the CNE 1,832,433 were admitted as valid. Of these 143,930 were rejected because their data did not agree with the Electoral Registry. These people have no recourse, even if the error is in the registry which is known to have many errors in birthdates. This leaves 1,227,580 signatures set aside. Of these, 876,017 were declared under observation which means people have to go and say they did sign, and another 233,573 have “other reasons”. Only these 233,573 plus the 876,017 can be ratified giving a total of 1,109,590. Thus, the opposition needs 54.4% of those that signed but their signature was placed under observation to show up and ratify that they did sign.
This is not insurmountable. Besides being unfair and not part of the rules, the other limitations are that the old and the sick will not be able to participate as there will not be itinerant signature collectors this time around.
In terms of collection centers, there will the same 2,700 centers to collect 1,1019,590 signatures which if everyone shows up implies that 205 signatures have to be collected per day in two days, per center or 25 per hour. This is also doable, except one PC per Center seems a little stingy. I don’t quite understand either how come they can talk about only two days to present the complaint as the regulations explicitly say in Article 31 that you will have five days to do it.
Finally, the CNE says that it will publish a “booklet” with the National ID number of each person that participated and the status of their signature. Have they thought about this? I just took the Caracas phone book. It has 975 numbers per column, 5 columns per page. A newspaper page is twice as tall, 50% wider and if you only print ID numbers and status you might be able to squeeze in ten columns. This yields 1772 pages, almost twice the thickness of the current Caracas phonebook! In the interest of fairness they need to make 7,000,000 copies. How much does this cost?
The Devil's Excrement 
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