Caracas Chronicles

Quico says: It wouldn’t be a Venezuelan election if nobody was crying fraud. This time it’s chavista dissident extraordinaire and scourge of the Chávez clan in Barinas Julio Cesar Reyes, who says that while 99% of actas (official tallies) were electronically transmitted from Barinas back to CNE headquarters in Caracas, only 90% were reported in the first official CNE bulletin. Reyes says that counting the missing 9% of actas would show him in the lead.

Thankfully, for all its many, many faults, CNE’s electronic voting system does contain an auditing mechanism that would make any numerical fraud very, very evident. The system generates not one, not two, but three independent tallies: a center-by-center machine tally, a hand-counted audit tally and the central tally calculated by CNE in Caracas. Witnesses from each campaign are entitled to receive copies of the first two on a center-by-center basis; the third is made public online.

If the three sets of tallies match (triple congruence), there’s really no credible way to claim fraud.

Just as a refresher, lets review how the auditing mechanism works.

(These slides are just reproduced from a post a few days after the 2D referendum…seems like I end up needing them after every election.)

Basically, it’s very simple, Julio Cesar: if you can show, acta en mano, that there is no Triple Congruence between Audit Tallies, CNE Tallies, and Machine Tallies, you have a serious case to make. If you can’t, you don’t.

Your witnesses were entitled to copies of the Machine and Audit Tallies at each and every voting center in Barinas: if you had your act together, you have them in your possession right now.

So, no te nos vayas por la tangente. Don’t tell me about the actas…show them to me. Just get on a scanner and get to it! Which specific voting machines are we talking about? From which specific voting centers? At which specific escuelitas rurales? We need specifics here, not arm waving.

If the 9% of actas not reflected in the First Bulletin really do put you in the lead, you’d better produce the goods.

A fraud allegation, acta en mano, would be absolutely devastating. Without it, it’s worse than a waste of time: it’s a credibility black hole. Loose talk of election fraud with no evidence to back it up has cost the anti-Chávez movement way too much in the past for us to continue to tolerate it.

Ya basta con la habladera de paja: show me the actas!!