Caracas Chronicles

Alright, people, it’s time to get quantitative about September’s elections. Exactly how many seats are we likely to get? What are the real, not hypish-effects of gerrymandering? What would happen if we got the same share of the vote in September we got in the regional elections in 2008? How many seats is that? And what if we did 5% better than we did back then? How about 10% better? 

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I do now have the key tool you need to find them.

In this Excel worksheet, kindly contributed by Melenúo, you get a digest of all the district changes CNE pulled as part of their gerrymandering exercise this year, alongside results from previous elections in the 8 states (+DC) affected. Melenúo’s first, rough approximation suggests that if the votes are distributed exactly as they were in 2009’s referendum, chavismo would get 123 seats to our 42: that’s 75% of the seats on the basis of 54% of the votes.

The caveat is that just eight of their seats are directly attributable to the 2010 gerymander: even with the 2005 districts, the government would’ve gotten 115 seats to our 50 (or 69.7% of the seats on the basis of 54% of the votes.) Thing is, the circuitos were already pretty aggressively gerrymandered, and morocha-shenanigans were already in place to magnify the seat-haul of the single largest group.

But to burrow deeper into the data what we really need is a bit of collaboration. So if this kind of thing is your idea of a fun Sunday morning, download the sheet and go at it.

Melenúo’s approach focuses on just the seven states (plus Distrito Capital) where CNE reshuffled the circuitos this year. His little sheet needs a lot of work before it can be made the basis of a more comprehensive analysis.

In the spirit of open-source collaboration, I’m asking all qualified geeks to download it and have a go at it. We need a bit of a swarm here. You know who you are. Omar, buddy, set aside a bit of your Sunday for this. Mieres, man, you’re not getting out of this one…Edgar, Jesus, Guido, Miguel, Tarazona…you know what you gotta do.

And if I left you out of that little list: here’s your chance to earn your Geek-stripes.

• Download the Excel Sheet here.

[Big hat tip to CL, who set this whole thing up.]