The Devil's Excrement

So, let’s see us people who are trying to understand if there was fraud or not have some sort of delusional illness, because we do not understand some simple concepts such as:

-The CD asks for an audit and the CNE establishes the rules. That’s like Enron telling Andersen, that it will do the audit for them and it will choose what documents it will investigate or not.

-The CNE, who in the case of the signatures for the recall petition requested an absolutely deterministic procedure of everyone having to show up and certify they had signed, now is happy with a sample of 150 out of the 15,000 or so boxes. CNE Director Rodriguez had refused as too small a sample of 3,000 of the so called same calligraphy forms.

-To make it all worse that sample will be determined at random, the CD can not specify which boxes it was counted. If you really want peace, count them all!

-One of the funniest aspects has to be that this audit is supposed to be non-binding! Now, there is an oxymoronic concept a non-binding audit.

-The algorithm to select the boxes at random is chosen by the CNE, as reader Brunilde suggests, if the CNE knows the seed and the algorithm, the random numbers generated become absolutely deterministic!

-The number of the so called coincidences keeps growing. In Aragua state (a traditional pro-Chavez state, out of the 440 machines, 120 have two machines with the same number. At the Escuela Basica Rosa Amelia Flores in Aragua, all 6 machines showed exactly the same number of SI votes: 114.  In Carabobo state it is 22% of all machines, in Zulia 33% of all machines. In Bolivar state, 62 out of 117 machines have pairs of the same number of votes for the SI. The CD has already documented that 10% of the machines have duplicate Si votes, but the process is not completed.

-Meanwhile, the representative of the observers for the OAS makes statements to the press that he has yet to see this coincidences that everyone talks about, that he studied the tables and so nothing anomalous, demonstrating that the guy that is supposed to be watching over for us has a more limited understanding of the problem than 90% of the readers of this blog.

-Schoen and Penn rather than shutting up, suggest that there are more problems with the vote than with their exit poll.

-The Government denies there was a cap to the number of Si votes, suggesting there is no pattern. Why doesn’t the CNE simply publish all of the results at the machine level and dissipate all doubts? Whi is it taht the CD has had to track down all witnesses in order to get a handle on the information. Is this reasonable?

Each of the bullets above should be sufficient to make anyone paranoid. The fact that all of them are occurring simultaneously and nothing is being done about clarifying or changing any of them, makes me feel like this is an episode of the X-files or The Twilight Zone called “Delusional Probabilities (Invented by Delusi?)” and only those in the opposition are practitioners of that field.

A reader points out in the comments that the story is geting out and there is this article in the International Herald Tribune on the fraud that mentions a place in Valle de La Pascua where the votes were counted and did not agree. I have heard of this and two other cases but so far it was hearsay:

“CARACAS The perception that a massive electronic fraud led to President Hugo Chávez’s mandate not being cut short in the recall referendum on Sunday is rapidly gaining ground in Venezuela. …Evidence of foul play has surfaced. In the town of Valle de la Pascua, where papers were counted at the initiative of those manning the voting center, the Yes vote had been cut by more than 75 percent, and the entire voting material was seized by the national guard shortly after the difference was established.