This picture is not real, but it comes close, the whole story so
sordid and stupid that it shows what type of people are leading us
these days. It is a composite of a graph in a book written by the man
on the right Jorge Rodriguez, President of the CNE and a picture of the
public presentation of said book.
Last week, the President of the Electoral Board Jorge
Rodriguez presented “his” book on the recall referendum. That is where
the picture comes from. However, the book had a “slight” problem, it
had the pie chart shown in the figure behind him on page 118. If you
look closely, the pie chart shows the “Si”, the option to recall Chavez actually
winning (in yellow) and the “No”, the option not to redall, losing, by
exactly the opposite of the official result. The colors are even right,
with the Excel pie chart showing the red associated with Chavez”
movement. The story had been going
around for a couple of days, but after distributing hundreds of copies
of the book someone noticed the “slight” mistake and they started
getting the books back. Supposedly Chavez was enraged that this could
even happen and he demanded that all copies of the book be collected.
Newspaper “El Nuevo Pais” got as hold of the copy and today published
this composition of the pie chart and the presentation to really drive the
point home.
Now, if you asked me, I would have said this was the work of a
“mano peluda”
(hairy hand), the term used here in Venezuela when somebody quietly
plays such a dirty trick on someone. However, as a friend just pointed
out to me the ersults shown are not exactly the inverse of the results
of the recall vote, but are actually different. This rules out putting
the blame on the printer, like both the Head of the CNE and a Chavista leader have intended
to do today. This is not a printing error, the data is simply worng,
so, at least, it left the CNE like that. The official results of
the recall vote by the CNE are shown here, which leads you to wonder where the data even came from? Dirty trick or secret message?
But the point is also that the book
should have never been distributed with errors, coming on top of
that from an institution that has been questioned by its superficiality
and imprecision in the last few months, while it has always been
claimed to be doing a good job. The book should have been profread, the
same way that election results should be checked for consistency. But
even the data on the CNE website from the
local elections two weeks was posted with the wrong numbers, but nobody
noticed for days at that badly run institution. Can we even trust them
if they rae not cheating? I am not so sure.
But the story gets worse, it just turns out that this book which was
presented as a book by Jorge Rodriguez and not an institutional book,
was actually, completely financed by the CNE,
as was its public presentation, with the single approval of its high
handed Presidentt. This should not be very surprising, given that he
has chosen
electoral systems worth hundreds of millions of dollars and approved
their purchase in the past, much like he did not allow anyone into the
computer room where the recall votes were counted last year and he
intereprets
the law regularly as he pleases, despite being a shrink and not a
lawyer. Such is the state of independent
institutions in Venezuela today, run by individuals servile to the
President who act with arrogance, without any scruples and only
superficially check even their own work, as long as the final result
fits their
purpose. Except that in this case, it didn’t!
The Devil's Excrement 
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