We were already surprised by the amount of people who wanted to become mayors and governors. We were annoyed by the lack of unity within the opposition and pleased by the same thing happening within Chavismo.
There were 11513 initial postulations for 355 mayors (who are the ones on top of municipalities) and 930 for 23+1 governors (actually we have 23 states plus 1 Capital District). So each municipality had on average 32.43 possible candidates and each state had an average of 38.75 candidates.
Let's visualize this (we round it up or down, the figures used are based on randomly selected open source pictures, any similarity to real life or people is purely coincidental):
EACH MUNICIPIO HAS SO MANY CANDIDATES FOR MAYOR:
Each state has on average this amount of candidates for the post of governor:
The military Hugo Chávez had declared a couple of months ago he expected the amount of electors to be over 3 million more than in 2007 but it seems this became too much even for the so government-friendly National Electoral Council of Venezuela: there are "only" 16699576 voters. There is a big variance.
After the initial cleaning up, only a fraction of the postulates were accepted. Carabobo has now 9 accepted candidates (from 20 initial applications).
This time Venezuelans abroad (about 50000 registered voters, many more could have registered) won't count as they do not vote for regional elections. Their votes and the vote of 10% of all the voters were not even counted for December's referendum, even if the National Electoral Council had to provide the total counting two weeks after the voting day.
How is natural selection going to turn out here? Stay tuned.