Tag Archives: Polling

This weekend, Nicolas Maduro
won a hotly contested election to replace Hugo Chavez as
president of Venezuela. For fourteen years, Chavez oversaw a
program of subordinating the Venezuelan state to his socialist
party, culminating in the
mobilization of the army to secure victory for Maduro. His
margin of victory against Henrique Capriles, who ran against Chavez
last year, was officially about 300,000 votes, or 1.8 percent. The
Capriles campaign says its own recount indicates a 300,000 vote
margin
in their favor, and Capriles presented his allegations of voter
fraud,
which include that:
— Government supporters forced Capriles’ observers out
of 283 polling places, threatening them with guns in some
instances. There were 722,983 votes cast in those polling places,
and the lack of witnesses allowed the possibility of fraud,
including double-voting.

— Government backers on motorcycles, traveling in menacing packs,
turned pro-Capriles voters away from the polls.

— There were 3,535 damaged voting machines, representing 189,982
votes.

— Voting rolls included 600,000 dead people.

— An unspecified number of votes were recorded for people whose
official birth dates would make them 100 to 120 years old.

— In 1,176 of the 39,319 voting machines, Maduro got more votes
than Chavez had in the October presidential election even though
Chavez was far more popular and won nationally by a far bigger
margin.

— Maduro supporters held get-out-the vote campaigns at 421 polling
stations in violation of election laws prohibiting partisan
material at voting centers.
The government has blamed violence during protests
that erupted in the country after Sunday’s election on the
opposition, with Maduro promising to come down on the country with
a “hard
hand” and accusing Capriles of
trying to plan a coup ;(Maduro’s predecessor, Chavez, led a

hilariously disastrous coup attempt in the 90s). For his part
Capriles canceled a major demonstration today,
saying the government would use it to try to provoke more
violence.
At the Caracas Chronicles, Francisco Toro explains the
post-Chavez
Cubafication of his country:
Chávez’s extremism, his dismal vow to turn opponents
into ;polvo cosmico , ;stayed largely – mostly –
at the level of rhetoric. Venezuela has dozens of political
prisoners, not hundreds or thousands. Dissent was repressed
sporadically and selectively, rather than systematically and
comprehensibly. The result was something I’ve written about
constantly since 2002: a yawning gap between extremism in speech
and moderation in practice that was the defining mark of the Chávez
era, and a constant driver of opposition paranoia and government
dreams of final revenge…

Maduro doesn’t have any of the assets that allowed Chávez to make
Cold Civil War viable over a period of many years. He doesn’t have
the charisma. He doesn’t have the personal authority. And he
doesn’t have the money. He doesn’t have the luxury that those
assets extended to Chávez of leaving the underlying tension
unresolved. He has to resolve it. And that, basically, is what
we’re witnessing this week.

Any excuse was going to be good enough for Maduro to try to bring
Venezuela to something much closer to the actual Cuban model of
dictatorial control. For all his elaborate guarantees of
representing continuity, what we’ve been seeing this week is
something far more radical than anything Chávez ever tried to
institute in his lifetime. Henrique Capriles merely provided one
pretext, but any other would have been just as good.

We are, in other words, ;where
Iran was soon after the 2009 election.
As the campaign to pin seven deaths during protests on the
opposition
begins, Toro relates that Capriles and a key ally already have
arrest warrants issued against them, something the government
refuses to comment on.
It’s democracy in action. … Read More