Haven’t written very much in the last few days. The main reason was that there was really nothing I felt very inspired to write about or did not have enough information to write something coherent or significant about without boring you. You could say I had fuzzy vision all week. But here is a wrapup of what I thought writing about this week:
The CNE keeps sending very confusing signals. It sounds very disorganized over there, which is discouraging. People are getting fired, fingerprint machines may not be here on time, Battaglini gives militant statements to the press, more and more international observers are invited daily (good!) and the Board of the CNE missed two meetings. It seems as if there are many decisions to be made, but either they are being postponed or they are being made by only the pro-Chavez Directors in private.
I was a little surprised and puzzled by the large number of people that registered to vote in the last six weeks. Last year the Electoral registry was opened for two months and 450,000 new voters registered. This year, it was opened for six weeks and two and a half million new voters registered. Can anyone explain this to me? It certainly bothers me that there can be such a huge difference despite the fact that the places to register were the same, the lines seemed similar and the campaign to have new voters register was also quite the same. What gives?
I have also been doing a study on pollsters, looking for as much information as possible about what each pollster was saying in 1998 and 2000 about who was going to win. I am still working on this, but I can say the following: All of the major pollsters said in 1998 and 2000 that Chavez was going to win. One was right on the money both times: Consultores 21 who had the final percentages in both elections right within a couple of per cent. Mercanalisis was almost as good. Datos and Datanalisis were not. Datanalisis was right on the money in 2000 but way off in 1998. Datos was really off in 1998 and not too precise in 2000. I don’t have complete data on Keller and I am still looking for the data right before each election, as close as possible to the election day. For now, if Consultires 21 or Mercanalisis speak, you should listen.
A second important conclusion to what I have been doing is that ALL of them were way off in what abstention was going to be. In fact, all that mentioned it said that they were expecting lower abstention in 2000 than in 1998 by a lot. Abstention was higher in 2000 when compared to 1998.
Oil has also been on the news. It is still unclear how much oil Venezuela is producing. In separate news OPIC, a US government Agency that sells risk insurance to private companies ruled that PDVSA had confiscated the property of SAIC in the joint venture between PDVSA and SAIC to outsource PDVSA’s IT needs. The ruling means that OPIC will pay SAIC six million dollars and will go to arbitration to have PDVSA reimburse the six million dollars to OPIC.
Finally, I was going to write about the simple corruption case with the sale of the Citibank building to the Government but it has already been covered in detail in Caracas Chronicles.
I was also busy with training to participate in election day and with the Zonageek Meetup Caracas in which a bunch of bloggers got together this week to have a good time. You can read about it there or in Hugo’s blog.
The Devil's Excrement 
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