The Devil's Excrement

The opposition met with the Consejo Nacional Electoral and asked for the electoral Board to clarify a number of inconsistencies in the data, before accepting whether to go or not to the process of having citizens confirm or not that they signed to request for the President’s recall. The following are some of the criticisms of the data. The opposition challenged the validity of the CNE database, including the following inconsistencies:

i) The regulations established a total of five (5) criteria for invalidating a signature; the CNE used thirty eight (38) different criteria.

ii) The CNE President said when announcing the results of the analysis of the data that they had accepted 3.086.013 signatures as being in the forms, the CNE database contains 3.475.200 signatures the opposition handed in.

iii) The CNE President said 1.832.493 signatures had been declared valid, the database says only 1.783.523 have been accepted.

iv) There are 224 thousand signatures that the CNE rejected due to errors in the cover sheets that the opposition has as accepted by the CNE and stamped by the CNE.

v) There are 28 thousand signatures rejected because they do not appear in the cover sheets, the opposition claims they are there.

vi) There are 23 thousand signatures “lost” by the CNE which now the CNE has “found” and is processing.

vii) There are 276 thousand signatures that have inconsistencies with the Electoral registry and most of them have no problem and are correct.

viii) Of the controversial forms with the same calligraphy, the opposition “discovered” that 54% of them do not have the same calligraphy.

Now, what this implies is the following:

Carrasquero said 1.83 million had been accepted and 876 thousand were planas. The opposition claims 54% of the latter were not planas AT ALL. Add those 473 thousand and the opposition has 2.303 million and it needs 2.432 million, a difference of only 129 thousand signatures which could easily be obtained in the confirmation process. .

Additionally, if you add to that totals 1.83 million+473 thousand (viii) + 276 thousand (vii) + 23 thousand (vi) + 28 thousand (v) + 224 thousand (iv), you get 2.854 million signatures, more than 400 thousand than required.

Now what?

This entry was posted on March 12, 2004 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Venezuela.