"Fraud!" and Switch: the last gasp of Venezuela's dying opposition.

If you think that’s all that happened, you’ve missed, though more likely forgot something important.   Remember that the opposition originally claimed fraud within an hour or so of the CNE (National Electoral Council) decision.  What exactly did they claim between that time and the 2pm or so Carter Centre / OAS endorsement?  One needs not look any farther than the prominent anti-Chavez Monday blog entries, of every several hours.

Anti-Chavez blogs have the answer, just read the stuff posted in the morning hours of August 16th.  Read the following:

The CD says the results are exactly the opposite based on : Exit polls and the addition of all of the final results of all of the polling stations in the country added by Sumate. They said that the two CNE Directors that are not pro-Chavez were not allowed in the totalling of the data of the CNE. There was no audit of the paper ballots and this was a gigantic fraud. Nothing yet from OAS and the Carter Center. I hear two different rumors, one that at ten AM ther willbe a press conference, two, that OAS may leave the country without saying anything a la Peru. Very sad and confusing outcome. This is the worst possible. The Cd also said they will ask for the addition of all paper ballots printed by the voting machines.

        – Miguel Octavio, owner of popular anti-Chavez blog The Devil’s Excrement

Regarding the exit polls, - they were banned and couldn’t be announced before polls close.  The company in question of the exit poll mentioned has been virulently discredited.

The OAS and Carter Center did not leave Venezuela without saying anything; they surely said something very clearly and bluntly.   "After a sufficient analysis from our own sources, we are in a position to say that our information coincides with the partial results of the CNE," Carter stated in a press conference on Monday afternoon.  "There is no evidence of fraud, and any allegations of fraud are completely unwarranted.”That wasn’t enough for the oligarchs and their shocked supporters who were convinced that there is no way in hell anyone would support Chavez.  Anti-Chavez blogs, following the press conference, started demanding an audit of voting centers to make sure that the paper receipts that voters knew were correct, would be counted to match up to the results.

Anti-Chavez blogger Francisco Toro of Caracas Chronicles posted a comment regarding the necessity of having an on the spot audit in order to legitimize the results entitled “No on-the-spot audit, no closure”.  The news media too gave considerable coverage to the opposition who wished to have an audit be performed.  On Tuesday night, anti-Chavez reporter Juan Forero reported that there will be an “audit by electoral authorities of a sampling of recall results, as opposition groups are demanding.”

From that point on, the situation would slowly chameleon into something completely different.  The opposition, borrowing a page from the political playbook of George W. Bush, switched the bait and the rationale of their electoral protest.  As it appeared that their original claims of oddities and irregularities began to crumble in front of them, a new rationale for protesting the outcome needed to have been created.  So on they went.

The audit that the opposition wanted so much to take place, you know the kind where they take the physical paper ballots and match them up to the results, was surprisingly boycotted by the opposition, a good indication of their presumption of its outcome.  Well, why would that be?  Turns out that despite four hours of examining the electronic results prior to announcement, and the OAS observers’ confirmation of agreement with the CNE results, the opposition “claimed to have unearthed new evidence of fraud, which they insisted the audit - proposed by former President Jimmy Carter and the Organization of American States - would fail to detect.”  Right.

So what is this “new evidence” that so conveniently was not “unearthed” at the time before other fraud claims were discredited, though was suddenly noticed after everyone accepted the results.  Well, unconfirmed reports suggest that many voting machines tallied up similar numbers for the Si votes.  The suggestion made from anti-Chavez activists is that the government purposely rigged the machines in order to have the same number of Si votes in certain areas.  Very convenient that these reports came up shortly after the previous fraud claims have been swiftly and successfully discredited.

Obviously President Chavez (and/or his CNE cronies) were so utterly foolish to have those certain voting machines programmed to spit out the same (presumably lower than genuine) Si count, as to arouse suspicion and cause potential bad PR.  Or maybe the Venezuelan government had nothing to do with the manufacture and programming of the voting machines?   Yea, as a matter of fact, the US-based software company Smartmatic made the voting machines, a company that is very confident of its operations in Venezuela.  Not only has this electronic election never aroused suspicion of government evildoing, including during the test run that happened several days before the referendum, instead this election has been marked by suspicions from the other perspective, pointing to a tie between the US DoJ and Venezuela’s opposition coordinating groups.

This may all be important information explaining the new cries from the opposition, but it still does not answer why they are boycotting the audit of the paper ballots.  The answer to that is simple, they claim to not trust the auditing of 150 random polling sites, citing that the CNE will “choose” the sites for this random audit.  Of course, such an unreservedly idiotic assertion comes in direct conflict with the facts.  First of all, two of the five members of the CNE are openly anti-Chavez (with two government supporters, and a neutral head).  Secondly, the random picking of the voting sites has been guaranteed and endorsed by Jimmy Carter and Cesar Gaviria (OAS leader, former rightist President of Colombia).

Finally, such an extraneous issue as randomizing the sites could have been addressed well with a direct dialogue, something that could have happened if the opposition agreed to monitor the audit instead of boycotting it.  Unfortunately for the opposition, the aforementioned facts from such a dialogue would only prove them ever more foolish.  It is rather clear; the internationally respected observers are not going to conspire with the CNE to pick and choose certain sites that do not reveal the alleged opposition fraud.  Of course, if one is so entrenched with opposition ideology, any baseless theory that leaves an ounce of air for the possibility of unfair victory will certainly get credence.

The shifting, baseless claims of fraud are dragging the opposition down lower and lower, possibly beyond recovery for the 2006 election.  For their conduct during this recall referendum, opposition leaders and their endangered parrots of the commercial media, are deservingly the laughing stocks of authentic journalists worldwide.