There are 215,000 Venezuelans who legally live in the US. Of these, 25,903 are registered to vote in Miami, which acts as a voting center for Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Chavez got only 2.23% of the votes in that Consulate against Manuel Rosales in 2006.
Contrast that with Cuba, where barely 665 Venezuelan are currently registered to vote. Chavez got 100% of the votes against Manuel Rosales in 2006 in Cuba.
But,…there are FOUR (4) voting centers in Cuba so that the 665 voters can comfortably vote for Hugo at their leisure.
The Devil's Excrement 
August 2, 2011 at 9:52 am
I am interested in the international voting laws. There is a similar situation with Native Americans in the US. They claim to be a soveign nation. Yet they vote on and off reservation, sometimes out numbering off reservation voters. They do not pay land taxes on the reservation. I question the legality of their off reservation votes. The question: How do legal ( US )Venesuelans vote in Venesuela ? If there were no restriction, Venesuelan expatriates could carry an election in their old country if they all voted together on a candidate. The Irish in NY outnumber several cities in Ireland. I wonder what would happen if they formed a remote voting block or the Tamils or other foreign populations.
S.
August 1, 2011 at 11:44 pm
I’m sorry to be the wet blanket, but Chavez isn’t Venezuela’s big problem. Don’t misunderstand me, I wish him nothing but Godspeed (towards his final chapter), it’s just that Chavez merely represents the largest plurality of Venezuelans.
It’s analogous to taking a cough suppressant and as the cough subsides, declaring yourself cured of the flu. Or saying that the chemo is working because your hair is falling out. Same sad (and juvenile) reasoning.
August 2, 2011 at 2:25 am
Deananash is into something and I have thought something similar.
I would say it like this: I have been wondering whether Hugo Chávez is
the median or the mode.
He is not the average. Chávez is probably less corrupt than the average Venezuelan, even though he allows corruption to happen, like the vast majority. His family and Diosdado and Rodríguez etc are much more corrupt than the average, but I don’t believe he is more corrupt than the average.
Chávez might be particularly representative in the way he interacts with people, he laughs, etc. He is definitely representative in the way he does not plan anything.
His education level is pretty bad, but above average
and even though he knows rubbish about history, he knows much more than the vast majority of Venezuelans.
He has a stronger desire for power and this “vision” feelings that have excited the majority of Venezuelans at some time.
A couple of particularities, like the myth telling, have allowed him to get more power than he would get.
I have said it many times: Chávez is just a golem created by an uncoodinated process from society as a whole and a conscious effort from the extreme left trying to infiltrate the military for decades.
Venezuelans left and right have mostly a rather strong feudal mentality.
They are completely ignorant of the concept of actual debate.
If the Enlightment hardly transformed Spain, it did not even touch Venezuela. It doesn’t help that we have such a reactionary upper middle class (in general). So we have these extremes where the ones not making it blame it all on the others and the ones who made it or even got born in it or think they all made it from sheer effort and attitude and not from being closer to the petrocow.
Miguel, oil did make it all worse but i recently read Venezuela’s administration at the middle of the XVIII century had to be paid by transfers from Mexico and Peru. I can see why.
August 2, 2011 at 2:26 am
“two thirds of Venezuela’s administration” is what I meant
August 1, 2011 at 10:07 pm
All votes are equal, but some more votes are more equal than others.
August 1, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Ira, you mean Dec 2012. Assuming he’s stage 4 with lymph nodes compromised then it he may just not make it. Personally, I would forego the chemo but in his case chemo is good.
August 1, 2011 at 8:21 pm
“The chemo is working since I’m losing my hair”?
August 1, 2011 at 4:18 pm
This is all irrelevant:
More important is Chavez showing his chemo-induced bald head today and claiming, “The chemo is working, since I’m losing my hair. But I’m also shaving it at the same time.”
HUH????????????
The man’s stupidity never ends, but he will NOT live to see December. This is a fact.
So all of a sudden, I now believe in God. And I feel no guilt in hoping for his death.
August 1, 2011 at 3:57 pm
“It’s not the people who vote that counts, it’s the people who count the votes.” Joseph Stalin
In all of Venezuela there surely must be some young, computer-savy kids who can do an in-depth analysis of Venezuelan voter trends. Knowing previous voter counts and corresponding voter population numbers could be critical to the outcome of any future elections. Are all of the counted ballots from real people? ….living within the district? Doing the tedious groundwork ‘now,’ will lesson the voter fraud at a future date.
August 1, 2011 at 1:03 pm
What I have noticed is how corrupt the Diex is.Several times when I went to renew my cedula I was given 3 identical cedulas by a cousin who worked in the one downtown, and I did not ask for them.According to him, it was just in case I lost one or 2.Did anyone notice that he was doing this? Did anyone care?
Falsifying documents easy? I imagine.I have friends from Mexico and El Salvador here in town, who say any old trailer camp cranks them out.Mostly false SS cards.People here are so naive about some things, that the DMV hired a Mexican to translate (dmv is driver’s licensing), who simply gave out the answers to his fellow countrymen.
There is so much skullduggery going on in the world, and so much propaganda, it is getting pretty hard to fight it.Politicians are in it for the votes and the money, others just for the money, and others for blinding ideology.
August 1, 2011 at 12:53 pm
We should have a system like the Italian voting system. You are registered as an Italian voting abroad. You receive your voting instructions by mail and send them back to your Consulate before a certain date. The problem is that nobody trust the venezuelan consulates…
August 1, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Bruni, what’s the difference? OK, the only difference is that someone living in Bodø ain’t not going to Oslo, someone in Murmansk ain’t not going to Moscow and someone living in Gaspé is not bound to go to the consulate in Montreal. I wish we could even have the results at the embassies from 2007 published now.
This is really serious. In 2009 Maduro actually declared, even abroad, that over 50% of Venezuelans REGISTERED TO VOTE abroad had actually SIGNED a petition in favour of the referendum. we have the actas but nobody has moved his ass to prove this is not true. I wrote to several oppos and they did nothing and they are the ones having copies of all actas.
If we could show the actas from 2009, we could ask Maduro with an open letter sent to OEA, to EU, to newspapers such as El País where those signatures of over 25000 people abroad are and if he cannot show, at least how he can explain that over 80% of those who voted (abstention was about 50% this time as more people are pissed off results for 2007 were not published) , did so against the referendum.
One thing is to say “we know over 50% support us” and quite another to say “over 50% of those registered abroad SIGNED a petition”. For that he should be prosecuted.
August 1, 2011 at 12:27 pm
“like letting us vote with passports, as passports should be more secure than cédulas”
Lol…anyone with knowledge of the ins and outs of Venezuelan documentation knows how easy it is to obtain an illegal Venezuelan passport.
At a time when I had a VEN transit visa, the Diex did not return my US passport to me in time for me to travel.When I complained they gave me a Venezuelan passport, and stamped me a US visa on one of its pages..I would have lost my US passport when I took this little doozy to the embassy for repair had I not had my original birth certificate with me.
People have to remember that anything is possible in Venezuela and that Chavez will do whatever it takes to win, before, during, and after the elections.
August 1, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Firepigette,
They can be obtained illegally, but really: it’s not like you or me could falsify them. I have never falsified an ID but I am sure I could falsify one in less than an hour by using material one can find at any paperware shop. When you go to ONIDEX and get out you can ask for a copy of the ID at one of the little shops nextdoor. It takes just a couple of steps to make such a copy so similar to the real ID that you can use it to vote. So: if misusing a Venezuelan passport is rather easy, misusing a cédula is 100 more so. And thus, if they accept cédulas, they should accept passports.
I have both but I know lots of venezuelans who don’t and for some of them it’s a pain in the ass just go to there for the cédula.
August 1, 2011 at 1:09 pm
“and stamped me a US visa on one of its pages.”
Try entering the US these days with something like that.
You’d never make it out of immigration.
August 1, 2011 at 12:12 pm
He did not reply!!!! Is this ment to be a suprise to anyone?
As he did not reply does this keep you or other interested voters from contacting the so called international entities?
Just a thought.
August 1, 2011 at 12:34 pm
Pol47,
I have contacted them a zillion times for this and other things.
I have lobbied at the European Union with other Venezuelans.
I have helped other Venezuelans in organising meetings with journalists here to explain the situation.
I have contacted newspapers in other countries, I have organised groups of Venezuelans with double nationality sending letters to their represenatives here.
I am not the only one.
Several other Venezuelans have sent letters to the CNE with copy (open copy) to international observers. The difference, though, is that we can only do that as “venezolanos en EUA”, Venezolanos en Reino Unido”, as a lose group of expats, we cannot pretend more,
and they, the politicians from the Parlatino WE elected already, who get paid for that, would get a little bit more attention.
August 1, 2011 at 11:39 am
There are more than 200 thousand potential voters abroad, all in all. Only 58 thousand are registered. The government will try to do all it can for only half of them to vote. I was approached by one of our “diputados de Palatino” and asked if I could help abroad. I told him I have always helped but I wanted to know what he would do and proceeded to tell him about how many times we had demanded the CNE to publish results abroad. I asked him to write a public letter to the CNE with cc to different international entities demanding for the publication of all results from elections abroad plus some other things ‘(like letting us vote with passports, as passports should be more secure than cédulas and many people living abroad cannot go to Venezuela to get cédulas).
He did not answer.
What do our paid representatives want?