With predictable brazenness, the US State Department on Monday questioned, on grounds of a low turnout, the legitimacy of Sunday’s legislative elections in Venezuela. But, as the US government is well aware, the low vote total was caused in large part by a boycott and sabotage campaign mounted by right-wing opposition parties that Washington supports, both politically and financially.

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Vice President José Vicente Rangel added, “There are countries like the US in which only 25 percent participate in the elections to Congress,” while no one in Washington questions the elections’ legitimacy.

The decision not to run for a legislature that will be in office for the next five years appears, on the surface, to be an act of political suicide by the opposition—principally the discredited parties of the corrupt system in place in the half-century leading up to 1998, Acción Democrática and COPEI, as well as the newly founded Justice First, which portrayed itself as a party of free market technocrats.

In reality, it is only the latest gambit in a series of desperate political maneuvers aimed at overturning Chávez by extra-constitutional means. These have included the abortive US-backed coup in April 2002, which was defeated by a popular uprising, the 2002-2003 oil bosses’ strike, and the 2004 referendum.

By purposely ceding any representation in the National Assembly, the opposition is taking a self-declared path of “extra-parliamentary” opposition, whose methods and program it has yet to spell out. It is clear, however, that the strategy this layer is pursuing is aimed at provoking a US intervention to restore them to power.

Also, an interesting interpretation of the turnout numbers appears in Jeff Axel’s Oil Wars blog:

In the U.S. congressional elections we saw 37% of the electorate on average votes whereas in the just concluded N.A. election there was a turn out of 25%. But there is a huge difference. Almost all U.S. congressional contests there are two parties contesting the vote and they split the votes. Lets assume that in the U.S. the average voting pattern in Congressional races is 60% for the winner to 40% for the loser. That means the winning candidate, on average, got 60% of the votes from the 37% of the electorate that bothered to vote giving the percentage of the electorate that voted for the winner as 22.2% (37% x 60%). By contrast, in the Venezuelan contest the pro-Chavez candidates got virtually 100% of the vote as the opposition pulled out. That means that the percentage of the electorate that voted for the winning candiate was 25% (100% x the 25% of the electorate that bothered to vote). So, the average member of the Venezuelan Assembly had a higher percentage of his consituants vote for him than did the average member of the U.S. congress elected in similiar elections (25% for the Venenezuelans versus 22.2% for the U.S.).