A Chavista victory in Venezuela will be "fraud" to the opposition

[Judi Lynn]

A Chavista victory in Venezuela will be "fraud" to the opposition

by: Eric A. Gordon
December 5 2015

CARACAS, Venezuela - By the time you read this - presumably on Monday, Dec. 7 - the results of Venezuela's nationwide elections for its National Assembly will likely be known to the world. But as I write, two days before this decisive vote, let me share some thoughts about the process - and about the prognosis.

I have made this trip to Caracas - and later in the week to other sites in Venezuela - with a group of North American activists and writers concerned about learning the truth of what is happening in this country. These elections, two years after Nicolas Maduro very narrowly won the presidency as successor to the late Hugo Chavez, will determine if the Bolivarian process that Chavez initiated in 1998 will be given the chance to advance. If the right-wing opposition - widely reported to be favored and financed by the U.S. and other capitalist powers - wins on Sunday, Dec. 6, progress could be stopped in its tracks with dire consequences for the vast majority of the Venezuelan people.

In the weeks before leaving the U.S. to come here, everything I read in the U.S. corporate media pointed to a loss for the Chavista movement. Venezuelans, these reports assured, had become tired of the shortages of basic goods and staples in the stores, frustrated with everyday violence, outraged by sky-high inflation that makes nonsense of any efforts at price stabilization, and confused by the privately-owned media that pours out a constant blast of criticism of the government's supposed incompetence.

Frankly, I arrived expecting in a few days to witness "the beginning of the end," that moment on Dec. 6 when a majority of Venezuelans would decide to put a halt to the whole Bolivarian experiment, make a lame duck of President Maduro, and perhaps prepare the ground for his impeachment, and throw their fates to the waiting opposition.

More:
http://peoplesworld.org/a-chavista-victory-in-venezuela-will-be-fraud-to-the-opposition/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Here's a little known fact which could surprise you:

Demographically, 51 percent of voters are women, and almost 4 million are young voters 18-30). Women enter their "senior" years in Venezuela at age 55, with the right to start receiving a pension, and men at age 60. Some of us "seniors" in our study group qualify to ride the modern, efficient Metro system in Caracas for free.

How cool is that? It would drive Republicans insane, here!

[Judi Lynn]

2. Information concerning the actual personal voting, itself:

Once voters arrive at one of the 14,515 polling sites around the country, where qualified officials run 40,601 separate precinct tables, they identify themselves with their national ID card, place their thumb into a machine which reads their fingerprint, thus confirming who they are, and enter the voting booth where they have up to 6 minutes to cast their electronic ballot (most people take under a minute). When they finish, they receive a printout of their vote to confirm their choices, and they deposit this slip into the ballot box. At the end of the day the electronic vote and the paper ballots should match exactly. Witnesses from the participating parties are entitled to observe this entire process to certify its veracity.

Not entirely as a parenthetical note, readers should know that presumably voters going to the polls are completely sober: There is no liquor legally sold throughout the country for three days, from 6 p.m. Friday through Sunday - not even to us innocent visiting non-nationals!

Immediately after the votes are recorded and reported, an automatic audit takes place of 53.3 percent of all the precincts, randomly chosen from around the country, to spot any conceivable irregularities. Within a few weeks a 100 percent audit takes place. All parties in the elections have signed on to these carefully thought-out and elegantly devised mechanisms, regarded - to repeat myself - as among the most democratic in the world.