The Devil's Excrement

Could not miss posting today’s”Zapatazo”from El Nacional (Thanks Ana I.):

The power of the process is made of the Devil’s Excrement

Reading the audit report by the Carter Center is painful. Painful because it is sloppy, painful because it leaves a lot of material out or says things without explaining that what was done went either against the rules of the audit, an audit or the agreements made. Finally the technical aspects described are so poor and unconvincing that it makes you wonder who wrote it and if anyone approved it before releasing it. It makes you wonder if the reason that it is only available in Spanish is so that many will have no critical access to it.

Let’s look at some details:

-The report does not say that the boxes with the ballots were not under the observation of the Carter Center for over 65 hours, but goes in painstaking detail about how there were two observers from the OAS and the Center per state after that “grace” period and the like.

-The report fails to mention that the opposition requested, but was denied the opportunity to choose 50 ballot boxes to audit. This is without doubt the biggest mystery in the whole process, why didn’t the CNE allow the opposition to pick some voting centers, forcing a random sample after denying any possibility of the random sample during the petition drive to have the recall? CNE Director said in that case, he did not trust a sample and the issue was too important. Talk about a double standard, or is it a single one?

-The report mentions that 50 extra boxes were picked in case there were problems, but fails to mention that indeed there were problems and some of the boxes were actually missing and were never found!

-Why did the Carter Center fail to follow the agreement with the opposition that the random number generator supplied would be that of the center and instead, the one from the CNE was used? Moreover, all sorts of technical detail is given, but no mention I made of how the seed was chosen. Indeed, it does mention it was the same generator used on Sunday, if it had the same seed; the sequence was exactly the same! Bruni in the comments section has been wondering about this point from day one and she was right to worry!

-The report says that ballot boxes were “in several garrisons” while the CNE assured everyone that they were in the Fuerte Tiuna military facility. The report also talks about two states where the material was still “disperse” three days after the vote!

-The other report by the Carter Center is the final report on the recall vote. It has similar problems as the audit report. It does note that on Aug. 15^th, “hot audit” 192 ballot boxes were supposed to be audited, but only 82 were. Moreover, it fails to say that opposition representatives were only present in 27 of them and in those, the Si vote won 63% to 37%, despite the fact that these came from seven states in which the No had won in five. Moreover, these showed no discrepancies.

-The report fails to note that while abstention was 37% in the electronic vote, it was practically zero in the remote areas where the vote was manual, exactly the opposite of what has happened historically and what happened in this election in similar areas where machines were deployed! Any of my Chavista readers can give me a coherent and plausible explanation for this not so small anomaly?

-The report mentions in passing the problem with the total number of Si votes coinciding from center to center. However, the Carter Center continues to consider the coincidences at the level of the “mesas” (tables) and not at the center level. There is a factor of five increase in coincidences when the problem is considered at the center level. No detail was provided as to what exactly the two “foreign statisticians” looked at in their studies to say that it was a mathematical probability for this to happen.

-The report does not even get right the level of abstention, the number they give (73% of the people voting) has nothing to do with any of the numbers reported by the CNE in any of its reports.

Very sloppy reports on the part of an institution that should provide international and professional class work in a process in which attention to detail and critical analysis is crucial to the accomplishment of their goals. As the saying goes: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” or in its new version: “With observers like these, who needs observers?”

Reading the audit report by the Carter Center is painful. Painful because it is sloppy, painful because it leaves a lot of material out or says things without explaining that what was done went either against the rules of the audit, an audit or the agreements made. Finally the technical aspects described are so poor and unconvincing that it makes you wonder who wrote it and if anyone approved it before releasing it. It makes you wonder if the reason that it is only available in Spanish is so that many will have no critical access to it.

Let’s look at some details:

-The report does not say that the boxes with the ballots were not under the observation of the Carter Center for over 65 hours, but goes in painstaking detail about how there were two observers from the OAS and the Center per state after that “grace” period and the like.

-The report fails to mention that the opposition requested, but was denied the opportunity to choose 50 ballot boxes to audit. This is without doubt the biggest mystery in the whole process, why didn’t the CNE allow the opposition to pick some voting centers, forcing a random sample after denying any possibility of the random sample during the petition drive to have the recall? CNE Director said in that case, he did not trust a sample and the issue was too important. Talk about a double standard, or is it a single one?

-The report mentions that 50 extra boxes were picked in case there were problems, but fails to mention that indeed there were problems and some of the boxes were actually missing and were never found!

-Why did the Carter Center fail to follow the agreement with the opposition that the random number generator supplied would be that of the center and instead, the one from the CNE was used? Moreover, all sorts of technical detail is given, but no mention I made of how the seed was chosen. Indeed, it does mention it was the same generator used on Sunday, if it had the same seed; the sequence was exactly the same! Bruni in the comments section has been wondering about this point from day one and she was right to worry!

-The report says that ballot boxes were “in several garrisons” while the CNE assured everyone that they were in the Fuerte Tiuna military facility. The report also talks about two states where the material was still “disperse” three days after the vote!

-The other report by the Carter Center is the final report on the recall vote. It has similar problems as the audit report. It does note that on Aug. 15^th, “hot audit” 192 ballot boxes were supposed to be audited, but only 82 were. Moreover, it fails to say that opposition representatives were only present in 27 of them and in those, the Si vote won 63% to 37%, despite the fact that these came from seven states in which the No had won in five. Moreover, these showed no discrepancies.

-The report fails to note that while abstention was 37% in the electronic vote, it was practically zero in the remote areas where the vote was manual, exactly the opposite of what has happened historically and what happened in this election in similar areas where machines were deployed! Any of my Chavista readers can give me a coherent and plausible explanation for this not so small anomaly?

-The report mentions in passing the problem with the total number of Si votes coinciding from center to center. However, the Carter Center continues to consider the coincidences at the level of the “mesas” (tables) and not at the center level. There is a factor of five increase in coincidences when the problem is considered at the center level. No detail was provided as to what exactly the two “foreign statisticians” looked at in their studies to say that it was a mathematical probability for this to happen.

-The report does not even get right the level of abstention, the number they give (73% of the people voting) has nothing to do with any of the numbers reported by the CNE in any of its reports.

Very sloppy reports on the part of an institution that should provide international and professional class work in a process in which attention to detail and critical analysis is crucial to the accomplishment of their goals. As the saying goes: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” or in its new version: “With observers like these, who needs observers?”

Reading the audit report by the Carter Center is painful. Painful because it is sloppy, painful because it leaves a lot of material out or says things without explaining that what was done went either against the rules of the audit, an audit or the agreements made. Finally the technical aspects described are so poor and unconvincing that it makes you wonder who wrote it and if anyone approved it before releasing it. It makes you wonder if the reason that it is only available in Spanish is so that many will have no critical access to it.

Let’s look at some details:

-The report does not say that the boxes with the ballots were not under the observation of the Carter Center for over 65 hours, but goes in painstaking detail about how there were two observers from the OAS and the Center per state after that “grace” period and the like.

-The report fails to mention that the opposition requested, but was denied the opportunity to choose 50 ballot boxes to audit. This is without doubt the biggest mystery in the whole process, why didn’t the CNE allow the opposition to pick some voting centers, forcing a random sample after denying any possibility of the random sample during the petition drive to have the recall? CNE Director said in that case, he did not trust a sample and the issue was too important. Talk about a double standard, or is it a single one?

-The report mentions that 50 extra boxes were picked in case there were problems, but fails to mention that indeed there were problems and some of the boxes were actually missing and were never found!

-Why did the Carter Center fail to follow the agreement with the opposition that the random number generator supplied would be that of the center and instead, the one from the CNE was used? Moreover, all sorts of technical detail is given, but no mention I made of how the seed was chosen. Indeed, it does mention it was the same generator used on Sunday, if it had the same seed; the sequence was exactly the same! Bruni in the comments section has been wondering about this point from day one and she was right to worry!

-The report says that ballot boxes were “in several garrisons” while the CNE assured everyone that they were in the Fuerte Tiuna military facility. The report also talks about two states where the material was still “disperse” three days after the vote!

-The other report by the Carter Center is the final report on the recall vote. It has similar problems as the audit report. It does note that on Aug. 15^th, “hot audit” 192 ballot boxes were supposed to be audited, but only 82 were. Moreover, it fails to say that opposition representatives were only present in 27 of them and in those, the Si vote won 63% to 37%, despite the fact that these came from seven states in which the No had won in five. Moreover, these showed no discrepancies.

-The report fails to note that while abstention was 37% in the electronic vote, it was practically zero in the remote areas where the vote was manual, exactly the opposite of what has happened historically and what happened in this election in similar areas where machines were deployed! Any of my Chavista readers can give me a coherent and plausible explanation for this not so small anomaly?

-The report mentions in passing the problem with the total number of Si votes coinciding from center to center. However, the Carter Center continues to consider the coincidences at the level of the “mesas” (tables) and not at the center level. There is a factor of five increase in coincidences when the problem is considered at the center level. No detail was provided as to what exactly the two “foreign statisticians” looked at in their studies to say that it was a mathematical probability for this to happen.

-The report does not even get right the level of abstention, the number they give (73% of the people voting) has nothing to do with any of the numbers reported by the CNE in any of its reports.

Very sloppy reports on the part of an institution that should provide international and professional class work in a process in which attention to detail and critical analysis is crucial to the accomplishment of their goals. As the saying goes: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” or in its new version: “With observers like these, who needs observers?”

The Wall Street Journal asks some good questions using the same Enron analogy I used to describe the CNE audit:

Hugo, Jimmy and Colin, WSJ Editorial

August 26, 2004; Page A12

Last week’s recall victory by Venezuelan strongman President Hugo Chavez is likely to create long-term trouble for American interests in the Western Hemisphere. So it’s all the more disconcerting to hear the U.S. State Department anoint what was anything but a fair and transparent election.

On Monday, a Foggy Bottom spokesman declared that, “In order to address those charges of election fraud, an audit was conducted. The audit found that — did not find any basis to call into doubt the results of the elections.”

As “audits” go, however, this was akin to Arthur Andersen scrubbing Enron. The sample for the audit was selected by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which is controlled by Mr. Chavez, and was too small to be considered statistically reliable.

On referendum day, there was no open audit at the polling stations to reconcile the paper ballots to the electronic voting machines, as the opposition requested, because Mr. Chavez would not allow it. There was also no closed-door audit with all of the National Electoral

Council members present because the Chavez-controlled Council did not allow it. There was no inspection of the electronic voting machines immediately after the vote because Mr. Chavez would not allow it. And there was no impartial impounding of the election data — paper or digital — because … you get the idea.

We also know that Mr. Chavez sharply limited the number of international observers allowed into the country, something that hasn’t been done (outside of Cuba) in Latin America since Manual Noriega used it as a way to steal elections in Panama in 1989. The European Union refused to send observers because Mr. Chavez so severely limited the size of the team and its ability to move about.

That didn’t stop Jimmy Carter from bringing an inspection team — sharply reduced in size per Mr. Chavez’s demands — and the former U.S. President has played a crucial role in blessing the results, as he wrote in a letter to us on Tuesday. So it’s worth noting the reasons that Mr. Carter cites for his conclusions, as he recorded in his trip report on his Web site.

“We heard a litany of catastrophic predictions about cheating, intimidation, and actual violence planned by the government for election day,” Mr. Carter writes. Yet he saw no cause for concern because “We reported on the assurances we had received from CNE and the military, which answered most of their concerns.” He finally signed off on the outcome after he said he was invited “to witness the disclosure of the first electronic tabulation.” Mr. Carter’s logic seems to be that he could judge the election to be fair more or less because Mr. Chavez’s military and election council told him it was fair.

Mr. Carter never did a full audit of the vote, which differed dramatically from exit polling and featured hundreds of polling places with voting machines tallying the same number of yes votes — a phenomenon that independent statisticians find highly improbable. Nevertheless, after he “confirm[ed] the legitimacy of the CNE returns,” Mr. Carter also discloses on his Web site, he “called Secretary of State Colin Powell to report our authentication of results, and he promised to issue a statement from Washington endorsing our findings.” Which the State Department proceeded to do.

Our liberal friends keep lecturing us to accept the Chavez result, since anti-American politicians do sometimes win free elections. But this recall was hardly as transparent as, say, Germany‘s election of Gerhard Schroder in 2002. Mr. Chavez has a record of abusing the rule of law to gather ever-greater political control. He has allied himself with Mr. Castro and is promoting instability throughout the region. A Bush Administration that is fighting for free elections in Iraq ought to have higher democratic standards here in the Western Hemisphere.

Somebody “gets it”, Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal:

Why the EU Skipped the Chavez Vote

By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY
August 27, 2004; Page A13

Given how Jimmy Carter’s presidency turned out, it is not surprising that he is desperate to salvage his legacy as an international election observer.

That effort took a turn for the worse this week when verifiable reports emerged conflicting directly with Mr. Carter’s rendition of what happened in the Aug. 15 Venezuelan recall referendum. The Carter claims of omniscient oversight aside, testimony from reliable independent sources shows that the process did not meet any impartial standards of fairness.

To start with, observer rules were absurd, so much so that although the European Union wanted to play an observer role, it graciously declined in the interest of honesty. “Unfortunately, it has not been possible to secure with the Venezuelan electoral authorities the conditions to carry out an observation in line with the Union‘s standard methodology,” the European Commission declared.

Restraints included the fact that observers were not to be allowed to independently audit the entire vote, as they had demanded in hotly contested battles like Peru’s, when Alberto Fujimori ran for a third time in 2000; and in Chile’s 1988 plebiscite restoring democracy. Moreover, both the number of observers and their movement was to be restricted.

Such conditions were clear impediments to observers yet implausibly, Mr. Carter claimed in a letter to the Journal this week that his center “observed the entire voting process without limitation or restraint.” Mr. Carter’s rosy review of the behavior of President Hugo Chávez contrasts sharply with that of other observers.

Two observers working on behalf of the Organization of American States, writing in Canada‘s Globe and Mail, on Tuesday tried to answer the question of whether the outcome reflects the will of the people. “Yes,” write Ken Frankel and John Graham, “if the focus is on the election-day process. International observers have not uncovered evidence of significant manipulation or voter harassment during voting day or the post-election audits.” But “No,” they say, “if the focus includes Mr. Chávez’s pre-election maneuvers that tilted the table in his favor through control of the electoral apparatus and indirect intimidation.”

By now, the Chávez intimidation factor is legendary and Mr. Carter’s practice of ignoring it, as he did in his letter to the Journal, is baffling. Messrs. Frankel and Graham do not ignore it: “Thousands of citizens who had signed the petition that triggered the referendum lost jobs, pensions or suffered harassment. Many feared that their choice would be known to the government, and the ubiquitous presence of machine-gun-toting soldiers inside and outside the polling stations reinforced this concern.”

Venezuela‘s most important non-governmental election watchdog, Súmate, also strongly contradicts many of Mr. Carter’s claims. For example, Mr. Carter submits that “international machines were tested in advance” and that “extra care was taken to ensure secrecy and accuracy.” But Súmate tells a far different story. It says that while the original recall rules called for manual voting, Mr. Chávez insisted on importing an electronic system and chose Smartmatic voting machines without a transparent bidding process. One ostensible reason for going with Smartmatic was that its machines also create paper ballots, which could be used to audit the vote. But as it turned out, an impartial audit of those ballots was not allowed.

Súmate’s list of grievances does not stop there, and a number of its claims are irrefutable. There was, it says, a “severe limitation to participation in the auditing required by any automated voting system: Auditing the software used by the machines was never permitted, the source code was never released, and finally, access was never allowed into the Totalization Room of CNE [National Electoral Council].”

To support his case, Mr. Carter keeps repeating in the press that Súmate had the same “quick count” as he did. This only creates confusion because “quick count” totals are merely the sum of totals coming from Chávez-controlled voting software.

The only way to check the accuracy of the government’s claim of “victory” was to count ballots. But as Súmate describes in clear detail, Mr. Chávez blocked that process: “When the authorities decided against counting the ballots, the CNE agreed to a very limited audit with the other actors of the process, to count the ballots of only 1% of the ballot boxes, in other words, 192 ballot boxes. Only 76 of the 192 ballot boxes were audited, concentrated in 20 of the 336 municipalities around the country. Promoters of ‘SI’ [Chávez’s opposition] were present at only 27 of these audits while international observers were present at only 10 tables. Inexplicably, this did not represent a cause for concern or alarm to the international observers who endorsed the partial results issued by the CNE without that fundamental piece of information.”

Súmate says that contrary to Mr. Carter’s claims, it never agreed to a second audit because, “Once again, inexplicably, the international observers designed an audit together with the CNE without taking into account the petitions of the group requesting the audit, transgressing the universal standard in electoral processes.”

Finally Súmate reminds us of Mr. Chávez’s painstaking review of petition signatures calling for the recall vote, “an exhaustive verification” in which “every signature was checked not by one, but by three different committees of the CNE. Now, this same CNE, inexplicably, prevents a count for transparency’s sake of the ballots that represent definitive proof of the elector’s will.” Mr. Carter’s complicity in the prevention of a reliable vote count was a betrayal of Venezuelan democracy.

While leaving a door open for the charges of fraud OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria expressed this wholesale condemnation of the board of the CNE:

“it ended up deciding on the basis of party lines all of the time and that is something that damages somewhat in the face of public opinion, it was always the same three people that took the same position and they represented the party that backed the Government and that may the work difficult and took weight off what they were deciding”

Interesting words for a diplomat, not very diplomatic in the end but the truth. That is how mot of our democracy has worked in Venezuela in the last five years.  Little is discussed; everything that matters and is important is in the end approved by the Chavista majority.

Curiously, the resolution (wich needs a consensus) on the recall vote has not been approved and may never be approved and may be replaced by a declaration.  (needs a majority)

People are quick to dismiss the importance or significance of Exit Polls. Michael Barone wrote this article yesterday in US News and world Report about exit polls and the results of the recall vote. Exit Polls are statistical animals, as such, they have statistical properties that can be measured and tested. What the exit polls are saying about the Aug. 15^th. results is that something is very inconsistent somewhere and they can’t be dismissed easily. Hope to post the results soon.

People are quick to dismiss the importance or significance of Exit Polls. Michael Barone wrote this article yesterday in US News and world Report about exit polls and the results of the recall vote. Exit Polls are statistical animals, as such, they have statistical properties that can be measured and tested. What the exit polls are saying about the Aug. 15^th. results is that something is very inconsistent somewhere and they can’t be dismissed easily. Hope to post the results soon.

Not much time to write tonight, in case you have not seen Alvaro Vargas LLosa’s article today here it is, don’t agree with many things in it, but…

Next steps in Venezuela
Alvaro Vargas Llosa
Wednesday, August 25, 2004

I witnessed the recall referendum firsthand in Venezuela on Aug. 15, and I would suggest that, despite its taking place under very intimidating circumstances and a high degree of government control, it cannot be denied that President Hugo Chávez had enough real popular support to withstand the effort to oust him at the polls. Major soul-searching is now required among Chávez’s foes if they want their efforts to bear fruit in the future.

Let there be no doubt about the nature of that regime. Had it not been for the efforts of more than 3 million Venezuelans who have, through civil resistance, made life difficult for Chávez, Venezuela, the world’s fifth largest oil producer and the U.S.’s third largest supplier, would be on its way to becoming a semi-totalitarian state. After coming to power in 1999, Chávez threw away the constitution and used referendums and ad-hoc elections to replace the standing institutions with a loyal National Assembly, a government-controlled Supreme Court and a subservient electoral tribunal. With the use of thugs — the infamous “Bolivarian Circles” modeled on the Cuban “Committees of the Revolution” — he has intimidated opponents. Two violent incidents with many fatalities have produced no indictments, and there are political prisoners, such as Henrique Capriles, the mayor of Baruta Municipality accused of organizing a demonstration against the Cuban embassy (I tried unsuccessfully to visit him at the headquarters of the DISIP, the feared state-security apparatus).

Still, as Chávez proved, he has a considerable social base. Various factors come into play here. By far the most important is the hatred of all things related to the old regime, known as “el puntofijismo,” the name given to the agreements signed by the major parties in 1958 that inaugurated four decades of corrupt democracy in Venezuela. A coterie of private interests tied to the state and, particularly, to the oil industry (nationalized in the 1970s), enjoyed the spoils of a system that deprived the masses of access to capital. The military, bribed with oil money, stayed out of politics, and the people received what little the unproductive system of redistribution could channel to them.

He has also been able — and this is the second factor in his victory Aug. 15 — to unleash a torrent of oil money on the slums of Venezuela through a network of social services he calls "missions" that provide everything from food to educational scholarships. The effort is based on handouts, not on job-creating investments. In fact, the economy is in shambles, having registered a 10 percent drop in GDP in 2003, according to the International Monetary Fund. Thousands of small-sized businesses have closed down. But as long as the oil prices permit Chávez to obtain $20 billion a year, he can fund his populism.\
The last factor in his victory lies with the opposition itself. Acción Democrática and Copei, the two parties that embody the "puntofijismo" era, are dominant, together with other relics such as MAS, despite the presence of new, promising groups, such as Primero Justicia. The opposition made huge mistakes, such as the attempted coup in 2002 and the oil strike in early 2003, that made Chávez the victim and blurred the fact that during his government alone, 5 million people have joined the ranks of the poor. The strike also gave Chávez the pretext to purge the state oil company of all vestiges of independent management. He then turned it into a source of funding for many radical groups in Latin America, from the "piqueteros" in Argentina to the MAS in Bolivia.\
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One figure says it all: In the last quarter-century of that era, Venezuela accumulated some $300 billion in oil revenue (based on official government data), more than two thirds of Latin America‘s foreign debt in the early1990s. Little of that was used to develop the country, and the people became convinced the rich, white upper classes had stolen their wealth. Chávez, a man of Native American and African descent, was a child of that deeply felt resentment. Rather than dismantle the apparatus that had impoverished the people, he took it to the extreme. That is why he became unpopular after his first two years in office. But since then, the polarization of Venezuelan society has allowed Chávez to position himself again as the champion of the poor against the remnants of the old regime.

He has also been able — and this is the second factor in his victory Aug. 15 — to unleash a torrent of oil money on the slums of Venezuela through a network of social services he calls “missions” that provide everything from food to educational scholarships. The effort is based on handouts, not on job-creating investments. In fact, the economy is in shambles, having registered a 10 percent drop in GDP in 2003, according to the International Monetary Fund. Thousands of small-sized businesses have closed down. But as long as the oil prices permit Chávez to obtain $20 billion a year, he can fund his populism.

The last factor in his victory lies with the opposition itself. Acción Democrática and Copei, the two parties that embody the “puntofijismo” era, are dominant, together with other relics such as MAS, despite the presence of new, promising groups, such as Primero Justicia. The opposition made huge mistakes, such as the attempted coup in 2002 and the oil strike in early 2003, that made Chávez the victim and blurred the fact that during his government alone, 5 million people have joined the ranks of the poor. The strike also gave Chávez the pretext to purge the state oil company of all vestiges of independent management. He then turned it into a source of funding for many radical groups in Latin America, from the “piqueteros” in Argentina to the MAS in Bolivia.

This may turn out to be a good thing. It may finally dawn on the opposition that struggle is essentially domestic, and that radical new thinking, as well as new faces, are needed, and that Chávez needs to be attacked for perpetuating, rather than overturning, the old regime. If the opposition learns to live with this defeat, allows the new generation to come to the front and exposes the similarities between Chávez\’s system of oil- related patronage and that of the old regime, it will have a good chance of winning the presidential elections a couple of years from now.\
Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a research fellow at the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. His forthcoming book, "Liberty for Latin America," will be published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in February.\
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With the price of oil more than $40 a barrel, Chávez can count on the United States — eager to avoid, in the middle of a presidential election, further price hikes — to accommodate him. After all, he has never stopped shipping oil to the United States (1.5 million barrels a day, according to U.S. Department of Energy) or paying his debts, knowing that his power base depends on oil money.

This may turn out to be a good thing. It may finally dawn on the opposition that struggle is essentially domestic, and that radical new thinking, as well as new faces, are needed, and that Chávez needs to be attacked for perpetuating, rather than overturning, the old regime. If the opposition learns to live with this defeat, allows the new generation to come to the front and exposes the similarities between Chávez’s system of oil- related patronage and that of the old regime, it will have a good chance of winning the presidential elections a couple of years from now.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a research fellow at the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. His forthcoming book, “Liberty for Latin America,” will be published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in February.