Caracas Chronicles

Dorothy Kronick, an Assistant Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy (U.C. Berkeley) and friend of the blog, just published research that uses a fresh angle to scrutinize the validity of the results claimed by Comando Con Venezuela which show Edmundo González Urrutia as the winner of the Venezuelan presidential elections: she focuses on  the hand-count audit—la verificación ciudadana—a process carried out by poll workers on approximately 50% of boxes nationwide, once the official tally sheets are printed after the voting stations have closed. This audit adds an extra step to certify that results on the printed acta match the paper ballots that each voter deposits in a box once they have selected the candidate of their choice on a touch screen.  

We’ve written extensively about how the voting system works and about what exactly are the voting tallies (the darned Actas), but we were lacking a scientific exercise to debunk conspiracy theories created by government sponsored asshats and the like who try to put in doubt the reliability of “the best voting system in the world:” Hugo Chávez’s voting system.

Here are some precious nuggets you’ll find in Dorothy’s paper:

“I evaluate competing claims of victory from the Maduro government and the González campaign, finding clear evidence that González did win the election in a landslide. Venezuela’s electronic voting system, which Jimmy Carter called “the best in the world,” prints paper ballots that, in and of themselves, provide proof of what actually happened on election day. As a result, no one need trust the voting-machine vendor, or Maria Corina Machado, or for that matter a single Venezuelan opposition leader, in order to see that Venezuelan voters overwhelmingly elected González on July 28.”

“In the twenty years since the electronic voting system was installed, the electoral council has complied in every election save three: the election of a constituyente in 2017, a referendum in 2023, and the presidential election on July 28 of this year, for which the electoral council has (as of this writing) published no data at the level of the voting machine.”

Some context on this one, both the Constituyente (the vote to convene a constituent assembly that was intended to discuss a new Constitution but that in reality was meant to replace the opposition held legislature) and the Referendum (to defend the Esequibo) were electoral events in which the opposition, as a whole, did not participate. In the Constituyente, the company that provided the technology said they couldn’t stand by the results issued by the government; and in the Esequibo Referendum the government clearly gave a result that they pulled out of their… hats (10,000,000!!!!). In both cases there was no robust electoral witness network by the opposition. Which was not the case on July 28th.

“The double paper trail in Venezuela’s electronic voting system has historically provided robust evidence about what happens on election day. Time and time again, the paper trail has either confirmed the validity of voting-machine-level tallies published by the electoral council (as in 2013) or revealed that those tallies are false.” 

“…the voting system in Venezuela is the best in the world.”

Jimmy Carter

“When campaign officials asked witnesses (at my request) if they had happened to take photos of the hand-count forms, several dozen did share such photos; all of the legible ones match the numbers of the corresponding tally sheets. But more revealingly, government officials do retain the hand-count verification forms, returning them to the electoral council. Presumably, if the hand-count verification sheets reflected more votes for Maduro than appear on the printed tally sheets from which the campaign data were extracted, the government would have every incentive to publicize this fact. At this writing, to the best of my knowledge, there are no reports of such discrepancies.”

“In order to believe that the campaign data do not reflect the votes cast on July 28, 2024, one would therefore have to think that: (1) The González campaign was able to work with or hack voting-machine vendor ExCle in order to rig the software to flip votes in favor of their candidate for the purposes of the tally sheets, without issuing inaccurate ballot receipts to individual voters, and that (2) not a single pro-Maduro witness nor a single official of the electoral council has chosen to publicize a single one of the (likely) thousands of hand-count verification sheets that would provide 11 clear evidence of such malfeasance, had it occurred.”

Three-factor paper authentication: Apart from the ballot receipt that each voter receives from the machine and then deposits in the ballot box, and the famed actas (tally sheets) that the machine prints once the voting table closes, there’s a third document that completes the paper trail of the vote: the Constancia de Verificación Ciudadana. These are tally sheets that are not produced by the voting machine but by the members of the table that hand count the votes that are in randomly selected ballot boxes. Therefore, the hand-count tally sheets must show the same result as the actas, and as the paper ballots in the boxes. This is pretty much ironclad. Or paperclad, if you will.

We love this quote from the paper:

“The evidence presented here indicates that even extraordinary levels of organizational prowess, conspiratorial acumen, and resources could not perpetrate tally fraud that would produce the campaign data without leaving traces in the paper trail—traces that, as of this writing, have not appeared. For that reason, even a person inclined to doubt the Venezuelan opposition may also, without any conflict, believe that the campaign data reflect the ballots cast by Venezuelan voters on July 28, 2024.”

You can read the whole paper here: On the validity of vote counts published by the Venezuelan opposition