How the Venezuelan Electoral Fraud took place

As the hours go by, it is becoming clearer that something went really wrong in the voting system. Many charges have already been advanced, some silly, some serious. The serious charges have actually been considered serious enough that the Coordinadora Democratica, CD, has refused to go to the verification act that was hastily obtained today from the CNE by the Carter Center and the OAS, a CNE which until now was adamant in refusing it. Why is the CD refusing now to go along?

One reason, we are already on Wednesday night and who knows how the ballot boxes were preserved. Unless all the witness and workers of the voting stations can be gathered to verify that the security checks that exist on the boxes are the ones they put themselves, there is no security that "someone" has not played foul.

Another reason is that the nature of the fraud makes a random selection of tables almost irrelevant. To explain this point I have made yet another very simplified graph. Below we can see an imaginary electoral district with five schools that served as voting centers. Schools B and E were assumed to be more likely to be in favor of the opposition. Thus, the voting program was given a "top" for the SI. I have written below what the real SI was. In school B one machine had less SI than planned and hence its 119 score instead of the 122 ceiling. Schools A, C and D were esteemed safer and thus not tampered with. The SI number is the real number in these schools. The decision to which machines to tamper with could be easily made depending on the signature collection pattern of the November 2003 petition against Chavez, for example. Or on local polls. Or local party activists info as to the mood in the neighborhood.

Now, what does happen when the "quick count" is made by the Carter Center? With a green star I indicate which would be the randomly selected MACHINES. The results would be for example 104 (A), 122(B), 132 (C) and 114(E). Obviously this distribution seems normal and ANYONE doing such a sampling would find the same distribution even picking up a different machine in each center. However, if my sampling takes all the machines in a center and compares it with all the machines of another center, quickly some strange distribution would become apparent. For example if luck has that the draw is for the three machines of school E, someone should raise an eyebrow when seeing 114, 114 and 114. But if the draw was for school C, nothing strange would have been observed and the fraud in schools B and E would pass unnoticed!

That is why the Coordinadora Democratica insists on selecting machines from specific areas as a random selection would without a doubt attenuate the apparent fraud.

To end this I want to explain why the fraud was actually discovered. I think it was well planned and with normal results, that is, a clear NO victory, it would have probably gone undetected and would have just improved the margin of victory. But chavismo committed two, and perhaps three crucial mistakes.

Mistake 1: their calculations were probably based on polls favoring them in June. In July the situation had tightened.

Mistake 2: they really believe their own fairy tale that the signatures collected were fraudulent and that at any rate they represented ALL of the opposition.

Mistake 3: this mistake is probably due to Chavez arrogance itself. He probably insisted that the SI be no more than the signatures collected. After all, he had to accept the referendum and the fact that he was ridiculed by not being able to prove any fraud. Glory and/or revenge are in his mind, as the good narcissistic personality he is.

Unfortunately the SI were more than planned. This is why so many machines reached the set TOP and the fraud became apparent.

Now, I must stress one thing. This does not prove by itself that the SI won. There is no way to know the truth unless there is a guarantee that the ballot boxes have all been kept safe and are all counted. Just as if we had started with a manual ballot. Back to square one.