Caracas Chronicles

Quico says: Granted, it costs $20,000, but what a nice toy. Scanning 120 pages per minute, and boasting “Triple Ultrasonic Double Feed Detection with Intelligent MultiFeed Function” (not Double Ultrasonic Double Feed Detection, mind you, triple) this baby can make high quality scans of 33,000 documents of your choice in less than five hours. Once you’ve done that, putting the corresponding images online is a breeze.

Now, we all know the opposition political parties in Venezuela are strapped for cash…but is $20,000 really too much to ask for electoral transparency? How different would our outlook be, vis-a-vis the next election, if the oppo political parties could show us the actas they collected a week ago, if they demonstrated to us that their the results CNE has announced are backed up by their copies of the tallysheets and audit reports, instead of asking us to take their word for it?

As it stands, Sunday’s referendum results seem likely to become yet another low level electoral cangrejo, an ongoing riddle of slightly out-of-whack numbers that nobody can verify because the handful of people with direct access to the underlying documentation treat it as though it belongs to them. From the point of view of the acta holders, it may be that letting this particular sleeping dog lie is the most politically expedient course of action right now. Certainly, revealing a final outcome that’s closer than what has already been announced would be awkward for both CNE and the opposition political parties, for different reasons.

Problem is, political expediency shouldn’t have anything to do with it. We have a right to see complete, accurate, documented results every time we vote. Simple as that.