Who's afraid of the big, bad Gerrymander?
Some longtime readers are up-in-arms
about the CNE's (predictable) decision to Gerrymander the hell out of the constituencies ahead of September's legislative elections, which will ensure chavistas get many more parliamentary seats than their share of the vote would entitle them to. As speeding violations go in the Indy 500 of a government we have, it's a pretty galling one. But we should keep our wits about us: with some creativity and guts, the gerrymandering could even play to our advantage.
First things first: September's is not going to be a normal election, because elections in undemocratic countries are never normal. You can't judge success or failure in the way you would in a normal democratic context, because that context is precisely what you're trying to help establish.
In a normal legislative election, your goal is to get more seats than the other team. In the twisted simulacra of democratic elections that undemocratic regimes hold, the real goal for democrats is to subvert the undemocratic regime, destabilizing its grip on power and helping nudge the country towards the restitution of democracy.
The periodic elections that the zeitgeist forces undemocratic regimes to hold are moments of maximum stress for them: events that call their basis of legitimacy directly into question. We should be under no doubt that the Chávez regime is approaching September's elections with genuine fear. In particular, because this time around the fundamentals are really screwed up from the government's point of view: to the now cannonical three-strikes - the electric crisis, the water crisis and the crime wave - you could add six or seven more, and all in a stagflationary context that's seeing people's real purchasing power and standards of living take a serious tumble.
Chávez has arguably never gone into an election with such adverse fundamentals, and apparently the polls are already looking pretty grim for them. There's every possibility that, with a reasonably non-catastrophic campaign (always a big if), the Opposition going to get more votes than the government in September.
If that happens, the only question worth asking is this:
What destabilizes the Chávez regime more: allowing the opposition to take the majority of a thoroughly declawed, extensively decimated National Assembly, or keeping a majority of the seats even though they've won a minority of the votes?
Because, lets be clear: if the opposition did somehow win a legislative majority in September, you can be certain the government will move aggressively to strip parliament of its power before the new deputies are seated. What happened to Ledezma in the Alcaldía Metropolitana is the template.
Personally, my guess is that they'd give Chávez a sweeping Enabling Law, good for 60 months, enabling him to legislate by decree for the length of the legislative term. And then they'd vote away what oversight powers parliament still has, handing the opposition a hollowed out shell of a Capitolio. That that would be unconstitutional goes without saying...it's almost as obvious as the fact that they'd do it in a second.
Does this scenario undermine the regime's basis of legitimation? Sort of...though it would also allow Chávez to continue to claim the democratic high ground that comes from having an opposition-controlled parliament. ("Intolerante? Yo?! Si no controlo ni el parlamento!")
The second scenario arguably does much more to undermine the regime's basis in legitimacy: the opposition wins more votes, but the government wins more seats. The sheer unfairness of that, the way it spits in the face of a constitution based explicitly on the principle of proportional representation, the way it dramatizes the extremes of unreasonableness and ventajismo the government has reached, would eat away at the claims of democratic legitimacy of a regime already battered by those awful fundamentals.
The key, in either case, is to first get more votes than the government, and then make the government pay a political price for refusing to accept the political consequences of defeat.
But conceptual clarity matters, too: a vote organized by an undemocratic regime is not, and can't be, a "normal" election, so our success can't be measured by how well we perform in seats. Our success is the extent to which we manage to exploit the "natural" inflection point an election brings to subvert the regime's bogus claims to democratic legitimacy.
And from that point of view, the Gerrymandering could be a feature, not a bug.
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Quico-analysis
Thanks, Quico, for the great post.
You've written eloquently about the dilemna likely to face the government.
And in the meantime, the opposition has to figure out how to run a campaign in this unusual environment. What kind of promises and platform make sense, when the Asamblea will have exactly as much power as Chavez wants it to have? Will voters see their vote as a vehicle for protest, or do they have higher hopes?
(As for the prospect of the government taking more seats even when they've lost the vote total, I refer you to Bush, George W, and 2000.)
chapeau!
That, sir, was a great analysis. I'm sick with the flu and barely able to think straight, but your post is so clear-headed and energizing that I had to write just to say it.
Now let's hope our opposition leaders don't waste this chance and go in REALLY knowing what the stakes are, and what the Regime's response will be. Make sure they read you!
The problem is that, in
The problem is that, in foreign media and political opinion, if is legal, is legitimate. If there are a minimum breach in the law that allow do anything, nobody in the foreign criticizes in hard way.
Ask to actual government in Chile and the case of TVN-Chile closure in Vzla. Cable TV.
How to subvert? That is the rub
Thanks for your post, Quico.
The key points for me are:
- the opposition teams
need not just to say "you do this region, I do this other", but they need
to share experiences, tips, resources, as they have never done before about how to organize things and get around the gerrymandering.
- the opposition teams need to realize we need to focus on those who do not watch Globo,
on the people in the urban areas outside "the core 3 or four" urban centres.
- we need to announce what chavismo will try to do and we need to announce it not through Globo but on flyers, visits in the regions chavismo still had in 2008: the boliburgueses will try to emasculate the National Assembly, vote for us in spite of that!
- we need to stress the desire for more competition, counter-balances
------------------------------------------------------
Some details on "the province" I wrote about (this will get "local"):
Súmate has made a good job documenting the general issue and the people from esdata have also written something.
When I started to do the counting, I could not believe how shameless Tibisay and her people changed the electoral circuits in my region. I wondered why on Earth I read so little about it apart from an article in Notitarde and one in El Universal.
Juan very kindly sent me some reports from Miranda state/capital that showed they are not so alarmed there. The reason seems to be it is easier to do gerrymandering in Carabobo than in Miranda (distribution).
Salas is not doing his best and chavismo will try to use this.
As we are not working as we should, as a national team, but as a group of fiefdoms, unless Salas puts his act together and a real cooperation at national level is reached, we could lose unnecessarily extra deputies.
The Salas clan had arelatively good performance up to 2004, but things haven't been very good since their comeback. The fact the regions have now much less money is one reason, but also Salas Feo is simply not doing what he should and Proyecto Venezuela, his family party, is not cooperating with the rest of the opposition.
We lost Valencia because he did not want to take back his candidate in Valencia. Salas wanted PJ and the others to accept his candidates in every municipality in 2008.
I have mentioned there are logistical problems in that area (we are talking about an area with a million people).
Salas' people did not collect all the actas, unlike the people in San Diego. We also had very few witnesses in Valencia's South and Libertador. Everybody wanted to be in the North only, even if that does not make sense (statistics can show it).
Similar things may happen in Zulia and some other areas unless we do our best.
The oppo leaders need to discuss these issues at a national meeting.
Expectations
I don't have great expectations on the capacity of the Opposition to make a great play here. If they do it would be the first real one.
Aside from the 2007 Referendum, they haven't done much. The more likely scenario is that the Government wins a majority of seats with a thin red line of majority votes (but really really slim).
No need for a great campaign
When the fundamentals are this bad for the government - remember the 3 strikes - all you have to do is NOT BE THEM.
I think we can coast to getting-more-votes-than-the-other-side...which is not the same thing as "victory", obviously...
silver lining?
Hey Quico, your analysis is great, though I think you base it on a faulty premise, that is, you think that the opposition is in a majority, and thus just about any type of a campaign will do, just showing up is enough. I have to disagree with that. Haven´t we learned enough? even when things look great we always find a way to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. Without a comprehensive plan, a unified platform, strong leadership, some sort of presence outside metropolitan strongholds, as Kepler has tirelessly said so many times I don´t think we have a shot. I´m sorry but I don´t see any of that. I hate to be so pessimistic but this scenario could also work against us, because it´s going to be a hard sell getting people out to vote when the potential benefits are so meagre. What is it that we are about to achieve even if we do win? some sort of moral victory? a majority of votes so that someone else notices that we do indeed exist? we´ve down this road so many times before... I don´t know, you just seem so up about this. Maybe you are just trying to dupe us into seeing some silver lining that just ain´t there.
Indeed: don't forget 70% of Venezuela
I obviously agree with Eduardo (but then he is agreeing on what I was saying).
I have been witness in a very poor municipality that has over 200000 people (Libertador, where Tocuyito prison is and where we have the highest murder rate in a very dangerous state already), I am in contact with people who have been witnesses in other such regions (Miguel Pena, with half a million people, etc).
I have observed the pattern in such places as Delta Amacuro (if Sumate has the acta, results were much better almost all the time even in the same parish)
My impressions:
Many people are disenchanted but if they live in the barrios, they
a) do not have the organization skills or resources
b) are scared to death (who comes out first as oppo?)
c) feel nobody represents them but some corrupt, inefficient "same shit" cacique (perhaps that is the case even in Mérida, Guido may confirm this), as the people from the capital don't send signals, don't mention them (blackouts), don't ever go there
People in the capital and in Northern Valencia and Maracaibo can say "oh, each region needs to take care of itself" and I understand the point, but unfortunately, those people elsewhere do not have the conditions and even if we hardly have resources, we need to support them, if at least with ideas, with expertise, with flyers, with some time spent in the key areas.
You won't believe how lack of organization is so widespread outside the main centres. It is logic: education there is an even worse disaster.
I believe some students from the capital spending some time in Maturín, for instance, in Valencia's South, would
help set up more "agents uf us" there. Is it worth it? Well: Maturin has half a million inhabitants, Miguel Pena is the achiles of carabobo.
Perhaps a yanomamö village is not priority, but I think there are several gerrymandered areas in the 8 "big states" that we need to agressively support in the coming months.
Vice-president Carrizález
and Environment minister Ortega resigned this afternoon: http://www.noticias24.com/actualidad/noticia/141108/carrizalez-y-ministr.... What next?
Are the rats abandoning the sinking boat?
"What next?"
De forma extraoficial Noticias24 pudo conocer a través de fuentes de toda solvencia, que el presidente del Banco de Venezuela, Eugenio Vásquez Orellana, ha renunciado a su cargo
De-legitimised? Again?
I wish it were true, but the 'delegitimisation' argument just seems like the flipside of the 2005 electoral boycott argument (with an anti-abstentionist twist this time). The only worthwhile outcome in September, from the opposition's point of view, is to win. And frankly, as of now, that doesn't look very likely. On the other hand, if large parts of the country are plunged into darkness from mid-April onwards, as a result of Guri being switched off, then things might start to look quite a bit different. And then we might not even have elections at all.
Election manipulation
There are a lot of tricks that could be used.
Gerrymandering of districts is one.
Another is vote fraud, which could be executed in several different forms. For instance, ginning up extra bogus votes in safe Chavista constituencies could provide an apparent Chavista national plurality.
Setting up additional candidates to divide and dilute the opposition vote is possible. (It's a well-known trick here in Cook County.)
Nominally independent candidates could be run on separate labels in some constituencies; these figures when elected would then caucus with the Chavistas.
Another useful form of fraud would be to generate obviously fraudulent anti-Chavista votes in safe anti-Chavista constituencies. This could be cited as evidence of opposition cheating, blunting such charges against the Chavistas.
There are also ways to embed tricky rules that can be used to tweak the results. Turkey in 2002 had a truly strange result. To win any seats, a party had to get 10% of the national vote. Five parties with 36.5% among them all fell short. Some had won districts with 60% or more - but that didn't count. AKP, with only 34% of the vote, won almost 2/3 of the seats.
Another trick would be candidate eligibility rules that could be used to force oppo candidates off the ballot at the last minute. For instance, a person under indictment for a felony might be declared ineligible, and Chavista prosecutors can indict anyone, anytime.
Yet another trick would be to withhold the electoral map till the last possible moment, maximizing oppo difficulty in matching candidates and districts. Oppo rivals could be districted together. Late districting and residency rules could block others.
Interesting analysis.... but
... the thing with gerrymandering is that it is a chanchullo used in supossedly advanced democracies like the US including supposedly 'progressive' states like Massachusetts, as shown in the picture (or is it Dragonchusetts?). I don't see why the second scenario undermines the regime's legitimacy more. Wouldn't something similar apply to state legislators in the US--both Republican and Democrat? I remember that The Economist has run a few stories about how gerrymandering in the US can effectively undermine the popular will, but if nothing happens there, I don't think anything will happen in Venezuela.
I agree that the oppo may be able to take advantage of a situation like the one you describe, but something important would come up if and only if the popularity of the goverment is already in the tatters.
Gerrymandering is legal in the US, illegal in Venezuela
It may be an aberration, but Gerrymandering is not illegal in the US. In Venezuela, where the constitution calls explicitly for proportional representation, it's just not constitutional.
Moreover, in the US the maps are drawn by the State Legislatures, such that gerrymandering in Red-States is, to some extent, balanced out by Gerrymandering in blue states. Which, come to think of it, is a compromise I'd live with: if we were allowed to Gerrymander Miranda, Carabobo, Táchira, Zulia and Nueva Esparta while Chavismo got the rest of the map, it'd be almost fair. What's just not on is one party gerrymandering the whole country to its benefit.
Listen, I'm not saying that outrage over this is going to bring down the government. I'm saying that outrage over this may - at the margin - do more to undermine the government than the alternative: a ledecimated oppo controlled assembly.
The shit is about to hit the fan
Interesting article, but I think that between the lack of electricity, water and security and the abundance of inflation and corruption people just had enough of Chavez.
Events are escalating and people are fighting like it is 11 de abril but with more purpose. Chavismo is counterattacking with more force and the country is in the brink of total anarchy.
I frankly dont think that we are going to get to the elections as we are now, either Chavez is out of power by then or hundreds of opposition 'leaders' are killed or behind bars.
The shit is already hitting the fan but loads move are coming and unlike Chavez, the fan doesn't strike out.