Stealing an election: Venezuela 2010

The abject lesson of yesterday's vote is how chavismo managed to steal shamelessly an election. From now on Chavez and his followers are just a bunch of cheats that use all the tricks in the books to steal a "legal" electoral majority at the expense of a democratic majority. If you do not agree with me, well read the world press in general which does not understand how an opposition which gets MORE than the regime's share of the vote, gets not much more than a third of the seats at stake.

Or wonder how come that for the first time that Chavez "won" an election he did not dare to go out to his Miraflores balcony to celebrate. The cheat knew he had been exposed and could not take the limelight.

I am going to give you an extremely simple example that can be seen in the Caracas Libertador district. Already on the CNE page you can read that in Caracas the united opposition got 484.844 votes and the chavista alliance 484.103. And yet of the 10 seats at stake the opposition gets 3 and chavismo gets 7. You simply cannot explain this in democratic terms. Such a flagrant manipulation of an electoral system leaves far, far behind other well known "manipulations" like the Gore defeat of 2000 or the recent troubles in the UK where the Tories were stopped from an outright majority, in a system which already is comfortable with the winner not reaching 50% of the vote.

Another example in cheating  is next door Miranda State where the opposition got 57% of the vote and yet got "only" 50% of the seats.

Should I keep going?

That is why Chavez did not show his face last nice: he knows he got caught, he knows the world is unto him, with the FARC in Colombia, with his snake potion economy recipes, and now with outright electoral cheating to disguise the fact that now 52% of Venezuelans, in spite of all the threats, the cheating, the blackmail, the cheating, the insults, the cheating, did not vote for him.  And going....

Chavez last night got in fact the very worst result he could have gotten.  Had the opposition won he would have blamed every problem on them and get back a shot at 2012 re-election.  Had the opposition lost in votes and seats, well, the rest of the world would have forgotten that business and kept doing more "rewarding" business with Chavez.  But losing the popular vote and winning DRAMATICALLY the seat count is simply not acceptable in polite democratic society, and even less from a pseudo revolution which presents itself as the epitome of democracy, with the safest, best electoral system in the world.

Chavez cheating yesterday even managed to make the lousy victory of 2005 dignified in comparison.  Then he won 100% courtesy of the opposition mistakes.  A lousy victory but a legal one.  Last night his victory was deprived of any legitimacy, in addition of any legality when the new electoral law was passed in open violation of the constitution.  Think about the consequences.  For example, what serious country will negotiate with Chavez now that the opposition can claim with all reason that they will not honor future fulfillment of the contract unless they are consulted and also approve that contract?

And if you think that such a cheating victory will offer stability to chavismo, think twice.  For example, an amendment to the constitution can be called by a mere third of the National Assembly.  Amen of other type of referenda that the opposition is now able to call for, and get the votes for considering the outage that is already seeping everywhere.

The emperor has no clothes and the consequences are coming fast.