Saturday, December 03, 2005

It was the night before the elections... So it is the night before the elections. The events of the week have been confusing. As you recall I was in favor of voting because the machines seemed to be safer than they have ever been, even if the secrecy of the vote may still be in jeopardy if anyone keeps a log of the order in which people vote. (There is no other recording of this in the process). Conditions were much worse when the candidates registered for the election, there were not only the problems with the electronic part of the system, but there were the morochas, or twin candidacies that we have talked about so much and were declared legal. The morochas or “twins” were and are unfair, one of those convoluted legal decisions that Chavismo has used to make the absurd and illegal appear to be legal to the people and the world. That the Supreme Court said they were legal was proof of the pantomime our justice system has become. There is no minority representation anymore. Even for those that are pro-Chavez, but run under a different party. In fact, despite the guarantees established by the Constitution, that decision gives more power to the majorities. People from abroad may have a hard time understanding why this is illegal, or why it should even exist in our Constitution. But the answer is rather simple to me, the guarantees of minority representation is what has allowed small parties to flourish and thrive in Venezuelan politics. The opposition parties should have withdrawn when the decision was handed down or threatened to do so. Much like in so many of those decisions, the puppets in positions to defend the law and the people, the Prosecutor General and the People’s Ombudsman, sided with the autocracy and simply forgot and ignored their Constitutional mandate. Then came the now fateful day when the voting machines were discovered to be flawed and the rest is simply history. I still have not made up my mind as to whether this was done on purpose, known to the CNE and the company that made the machines or if it was ever used to cheat us. But it needs to be known. The truth is, the flaw was there and nobody in Government is calling to investigate any of it. It is as if it did not matter, their plan is their plan. Period. As someone close to me told me today, the problem is that they made an electronic voting machine that did too much. It was more than just a machine made to tally votes and mimick the voting system, which is all you needed. It should not even have had a hard drive. It should have added, tallied and printed. That's it! And much like so much software around the world it was flawed and the guarantee that it could not do what it did: violate the secrecy of the votes was wrong. Software is like that, Microsoft has been trying to plug the flaws in Windows for years and ask Sony about its recent debacle with its software. I still don’t know whether what has happened is good or bad for the opposition. Certainly the first results is that some political parties that should have disappeared long ago, will now effectively disappear and good riddance to them! I will not miss them. But on Monday morning the result will not be much worse than it already was going to be, unless the opposition voters’ abstention was going to be lower than that of Chavismo, which was possible. But there were too many opposition groups sending mixed signals to people that were hampering this effort. Once again, the heterogeneity of the opposition hurt us with this mixed message. Chavismo was likely going to get more than 66% of the National Assembly, not because they were that much more popular but because the morochas were allowed. Period. With a two thirds majority of the Assembly, Chavismo was going to be able to do the deep overhaul it wants of the Constitution and with the backing of the votes of the “people” as the morochas appear to have been long forgotten. Now it will be questionable how they did this. Thus, I do think Chavismo has a lot to lose from what has happened. I truly expected the Government to back down and reschedule elections for January. But the absence of the opposition tomorrow changes the event radically. This is no longer a democratic vote, with all major opposition parties having withdrawn their candidates (MAS is not major and Nuevo Tiempo did indeed quietly withdraw their candiadtes formally). The world has seen this too many times, a one sided election in a Government with suspicious democartic credentials, with one difference: in most of those pseudo democracies, a large majority of the people vote and vote for the Government. This simply will not happen here. With so many international observers running around, it will be impossible for the Government to say that even 50% of the people voted. In fact, given the surprisingly high abstention in August, which reached 78% with some clear shenanigans that took place late in the day helping the numbers, the withdrawal of the opposition makes it likely that this time around it will be higher, I think even much higher, unless the results are modified electronically. I don’t rule this out, but this time a lot of observers are watching. Of course, the absence of opposition witnesses makes the possibility of new types of cheating quite feasible. Thus, the Government has chosen a very risky strategy of making this a plebiscite and I was surprised the Vice-President used that word. Autocratic Governments that hold plebiscites do not win by getting a majority of the votes of a small majority of the voters. That simply does not work. You have to win big and have a large majority of the voters show up and vote for you, which will be impossible tomorrow. Since the large abstention in the August election, things have not gone well for the Chavez Government. Chavez’ international strategy has hurt his image loclly, people do not like this idea of giving away Venezuela’s money when so many things are going badly locally. Add to that the absence of the fingerprint machines which give people the impression that this time they can vote anyway they want (even if some, like Government workers, have to vote) and this complicates matters further. Moreover the campaign has been lackluster, wherever it has existed at all. In August, you had local candidates campaigning and motivating the people. The Government spent a lot of money. This time, the candidates for Deputies have been almost invisible on both sides. So, if anyone in the opposition asked me, I would tell me to emphasize that same word Rangel said yesterday: plebiscite. This is a plebiscite on Chavez’ popularity, looked at it that way, tomorrow’s vote will be a huge defeat for the Government. Emphasize that! But nobody is asking me or will ask anyway. The next National Assembly will look like a joke and will make a mockery of the word Parliament, there will be no discussions, everything will just be pushed thru at will, in a terribly undemocratic way. Can Chavismo desire that? And that is why it is so hard to understand why after being caught red-handed with a flaw in the same voting machines that were used in the previous three elections including the recall referendum, the Governments should have behaved more democratically, should have tried to patch things up and held more transparent elections in a month. It is much more than simply that this is not their style that concerns me. Chavez has proven over and over again to have no scruples, but when he has stepped over the line visibly, he has pulled back. This time he hasn’t. The question is whether at the highest levels of Government they decided this week that things have gone too slow and it was time to break with the appearances of democracy and simply push forward. Does this represent the ominous presence of a breaking point? That is my fear, as otherwise the Government has too much to lose tomorrow. We will soon know. If abstention is 80% tomorrow, the Government will no longer be able to claim it is democratic in origin and may go and travel a completely different path than that traveled in the last seven years. And that, my friends, is quite scary. 9:42:59 PM    comment []

The man who discovered that the voting machines had a flaw A single person persevered until he found that the voting machines did keep the sequence of the voters by saving a time stamp with each vote, which could then be correlated with the fingerprint machines and now with the order in which people cast their vote, if anyone bothered to keep track of it at each of the 27,000 voting booths. Everyone imagines that this modern day hero of knowledge and technology for the Venezuelan opposition is your typical hacker, young, geeky and self-involved. The opposite is the truth, Leopoldo Gonzalez is an Electrical Engineer who got his Bachelor's degree at Universidad Central de Venezuela in the 60's. Fired from CANTV in 1980 when the COPEI Government got rid of all the "leftists" engineers at the then state comany, he then started working at a local private company.In his 60's today, he has nevertheless kept up to date with technology in the belief that true power lies only in kwowledge, something not en vogue in Venezuela and its current Government. Whether Leopoldo Gonzalez will simply become a footnote in our history or his role will be recognized or not in the future, I don't know. What I do know, is that he is allright in my book. I wish in the last three or four years there had been more individual efforts like his. I wish there were more people who believed in science, knowledge and technology as the way of the future for our country and its Government. I wish there were hundreds of Leopoldo Gonzalez' going around trying to stop this outlaw Government with their brains. 1:57:19 PM    comment []

The shameless use of state resources for political gain I guess Venezuela has a new political party called PDVSA, whose members wear the same red t-shirts as Chavez' MVR, they are all going to vote, becuase if they don't they may get a black star in the Maisanta database, maybe get fired and not be able to maintain their outstanding physiques as they join the ranks of the real poor. I guess when they say that they don't participate in violence, they don't mean the violence used by the National Guard to kick out their fellow PDVSA workers from their homes, or ban the kids of those kicked out from their homes from the PDVSA schools and deny their savings to 20,000 workers fired from the state oil company, who happened to be fellow Venezuelans first. They are now part of the new minority, the one that Chavez and his crooks wants to discriminate against daily.. I guess it is indeed a different Venezuela, where state resources are used at will for political campaining and workers are forced into participating in illegal acts like the picture above.They may think they don't particiapte in violence, but there is something very wrong, obscene and even somewhat violent in the above image. Shame on those that paid for it with PDVSA resources. Shame on those that planned it and those that forced these people to appear in it. The symbols of fascism are now everywhere and growing. The illegalities are everywhere. The shamelessness is pervasive. The appetite of the empty revolution is unlimited, destroying all values in its path. (Picture swiped from Luis De Lions website) 12:31:07 AM    comment []