Caracas Chronicles

Hermelinda del Carmen García Ayala lives in Ticoporo, a small town in the scorching llanos of Barinas, in a house right on the town’s pretty Plaza Bolívar, pictured above. Hermelinda votes at the Alberto Arvelo Torrealba preschool in town. Has done for years.  

A few weeks ago, she spent several sweat-soaked hours standing in line for the chance to sign a petition to recall Nicolás Maduro from the presidency.

But her signature was never counted. Worse: it ended up fattening up the dossier Jorge Rodríguez has compiled to support his call for the National Elections Council to withdraw official recognition to the opposition’s umbrella group, MUD.

Why? Because, absurdly, the government insists Hermelinda García —and 10,000 others like her— is dead.

 
Access to the REP would’ve been really really useful to CNE’s data entry monkeys, simply because people’s handwriting sucks and handwritten records are often ambiguous.

To get to how the government ended up declaring that the signatures of 10,000 perfectly live people were fraudulent and belonged to the dearly departed, you have to go back to a previous CNE dirty trick.

If you’re a loyal reader, you’ll recall that when CNE had to digitize the original hand-written request forms, it made a “curious” choice: it decided not to allow the data entry flunkies transcribing the forms to check the Electoral Registry if they had doubts.

This decision never made any damn sense. REP is a public registry, freely available online. Access to the REP would’ve been really really useful to CNE’s data entry monkeys, simply because people’s handwriting sucks and handwritten records are often ambiguous. 4s sometimes look like 9s and 7s like 1s.

So spare a thought for the CNE wage slave who had to process Hermelinda García’s signature to petition for Maduro’s recall.

Ms. García plainly intended to have her president recalled from office, but what exactly is her Cédula number?

Hmmmm…you take out your magnifying glass and have a real close look:

Man, that first digit is hard to figure out…is it a 4 or a 9? Is her Cédula 9,366,492? Or 4,366,492?

Outside bizarro-CNE-rule world, that’s an easy question to settle: you can just check, by plugging both numbers into the online REP. Try it! Takes two seconds. Easy peasy. 

But that’s just the thing: CNE’s data entry exploitees couldn’t check Ms. Hermelinda’s REP entry, because their bosses decided to set their data entry task to “level: hard” for no reason at all.

 
Jorge Rodríguez’s claim that 10,000-dead-people-signed-for-the-recall claim is a dirty trick made possible by a previous dirty trick: an ambush set with every intention to disenfranchise 10,000 Hermelinda Garcías.

So our CNE flunkie was forced to guess the first digit of Hermelinda’s cédula number, and he guessed wrong. He transcribed it as 4,366,492 which as you can see  isn’t right at all, cuz the holder of National ID number 4,366,492 is dead.

That right there is how CNE’s designed-to-be-botched data transcription was leveraged to disenfranchise thousands of people like Hermelinda, and to question MUD’s bona fides as well.

And that, right there, is how Jorge Rodríguez’s 10,000-dead-people-signed-for-the-recall claim came to be. It’s a dirty trick piled on top of a previous dirty trick: an ambush set with every intention to disenfranchise 10,000 Hermelinda Garcías, for twisting her admirable civic spirit in standing out under the Ticoporo sun into an insane justification, part of some sociopathic Jorge Rodríguez mind-game to withdraw official recognition from MUD.

That’s how twisted these sick fucks are guys. Read all about it.