I will be brief and to the point
This morning I was in an early talk show with a Jamaica Kingston radio. They call me when there is stuff going on in Venezuela and over the years my sparring partners have varied including one year Eva Golinger herself. This time I found someone who I debated with at NPR years ago, Daniel Hellinger. The man remains a chavista light, those who live safely in civilized countries and do not need to worry about their everyday life degradation if they had to live here. Actually we had no problems agreeing in some points, but he dismissed the electoral result distortion saying that this was the norm. It is not.
I also wrote a text in French and I was surprised this time around at the virulence from the loony left. One thing that also struck me is how fast they had picked up the official line to defend the lopsided results, a witness at how well oiled is the pro Chavez "information". You find this also through Mark Weisbrot at Comment is Free of the Guardian, with the added bonus that for him it is democracy back to normal in Venezuela that we should focus on. Which is not but that is another subject. And at home we can find such spin pieces such as this terribly written AVN text. Without forgetting the one of a kind performance by Socorro Hernandez stating that those who disagree with her electoral shenanigans are creeps and manipulators.
One common thread needs to be observed here: the minimizing of the lopsided chavista victory of last Sunday, when many of these observers are suddenly less upset about the unfair electoral advantages they perceived in their countries now that these tricks benefit their hero/pay-master Hugo Chavez. I am not going to discuss the hypocrisy of the case, it is self explanatory.
What is more interesting to observe here is that in fact these people have a deep ignorance of how electoral systems are created and how easily they are willing to accept that these are modified when it serves their side. Nothing new you may say, but you are wrong because now the global left has discovered that using democracy and corrupting it and its electoral system you can access power and keep it for as long as you can get away with your cheating. That is right, the left which is supposed to promote democracy has discovered the joys of electoral cheating on its favor.
We need to frame our debate in simple terms because we can win that one easily. I am not speaking for myself who has had a life long interest in history, politics and henceforth electoral systems. I cosigned a letter with my fellow bloggers challenging Socorro Hernandez but I have no false modesty in writing here that I can take on Soccorro Hernandez or anyone else mentioned above alone, anywhere, anytime, without any manual or lap top, with just a white board and at least two different colored markers. I will trash them all, arguments and lies, in 10 minutes top.
It is not difficult if you know what you are talking about. You only need to present material such as the table I drew two days ago and carry it around, rub it on the nose of any defender of the Sunday result and see them wince. You do not need to mention Zulia or Anzoategui or Podunk: in no electoral system in the world who prides itself of a minimum of fairness you will see a regional result like the one I illustrated in that table. Nowhere you will see 3 of the 4 main states in the country go one way in votes and the other way in seats. It can happen for a state, maybe two in the case of very close elections but it will never happen for three major states. Never. And if per chance it were to happen, the civilized society will immediately think about a correction, not about defending the injustice from the dungeon high tower.
The Venezuelan opposition that lost so much last Sunday should never leave this issue sleep but should never be mired in stupid details about some busload of fake voters reaching a voting center 5 minutes after closing time. Just with my table, just with a couple of additional tables that Esdata or Sumate can provide or me or Quico if they want them for free, we can demand from the National Assembly that the electoral law be reviewed and see how the undemocratic chavismo squirms and looks worse and worse as it blocks the hearings of Socorro Hernandez and Tibisay Lucena. We have a great tool to expose chavismo and I am afraid that maybe the opposition is not seeing it clearly.
To close this I need to remind that this is not a personal matter as I kept trying to explain some of these people above: I predicted 69 seats for the opposition and it got 66. No one got closer than I did, at least as far as I know. Quico Toro did not predict the outcome of the vote but he created a model where plugging in the final result gave you the seat count to a seat. It was there, for public information all along, the distorted voting system. It was no witchcraft or tarot reading. Everyone in Venezuela with a critical political mind knew that the chances for the opposition to win were slim, and impossible this time around if you put its target at 53% of the vote for the MUD alone. It is all in my blog, it is all in Francisco Toro blog, there is no mystery. The result was predictable because the extent of the handicap was known.
What happened is that the cheating in fact worked better than expected and even chavismo was surprised by it, hence the lousy defense of the result, starting with Chavez himself who fell apart in front of Andreina Flores of RFI.
The opposition leadership could do worse than reflect on this. Quico and myself are their disposition and if they find us too arrogant our side kicks on the matter, Juan, Miguel and Alek can do the job too. The 5 of us have been better than any polling group in Venezuela, have yielded better explanations of the CNE cheating than them or even major newspapers. In fact, these polling groups should be sending us job offers, Globovision, El Universal and El Nacional should be begging us to write for them......