That nasty tendency to settle scores, or the truth about Sunday 8

In politics even the best friends at some point feel compelled to settle scores.  Thus we should not be surprised when followers ask for blood, as it is happening now from the press, through Twitter, to my competing blogs, who are all only too happy it seems to accuse the MUD of sugar coating the truth and what not. Me, a long time critic of Capriles, find myself in the need to add a post scriptum to defend him (sort of)  to my conclusion entry of last Friday.

The 2013 mayoral election results (7 and last): loose ends and psychological conclusions

After reviewing a few aspects of the results of last Sunday it is time to write down a preliminary conclusion. Preliminary is an appropriate choice of words since the election is still going full swing as I type: the regime is refusing to acknowledge the results and in the city halls it is forced to abandon or failed to take many measures are taken, from looting of the city property to appoint "protectors". We assume that these "protectors", a poor colonial term by the way, are for those chavista voters that are not a majority in that opposition ruled district, as if the incoming mayors had any desire to install a ferocious dictatorship even if they had the means to do so.  With these actions the regime does not prove it that it is not anymore democratic, that ship has long sailed. No, what the regime is proving to those who care to see is that it may not have suffered a major defeat last Sunday but it has suffered a major psychological one. In  public opinion it is transforming this election into a major defeat. Victorious regimes do not need to loot city hall, to appoint protectors, to explain why they won. They just win and move on.

The 2013 mayoral election results (6): three telling races, Guasdualito, Valencia and Barquisimeto

With 300 + races to watch and without computing power, not even reasonable Internet speed, there is little that I can do for an extensive interpretation.  However, again, with merely describing three noteworthy results we can have a picture of the situation and how the regime did "win" this election.  Barquisimeto is for me the most symbolical loss of the regime, and the best example of the treachery this one displays to win at all cost. Valencia is an example on how messy the opposition is in its organization sometimes. And Guasdualito the bright spot where reality eventually hits the regime.

Barquisimeto

Yaracuy governor first meeting with "his" mayors

The 14 of them, duly red shirted, duly 4F baseball capped. I do not know about you but this looks so undemocratic, that elected mayors must do as first activity to recognize the overlordship of the governor. Not to mention that some of them have, how can I put that nicely?, thug faces?  Note that this is not a working meeting, almost none has a pen and paper.  This is a staged photo op for the glory of the governor who does not even bother facing us (though I suppose in the official press releases we will see his face, this is a mere tweet from the assistant but how so more telling...)

Nuestro Gobernador @JULIOLEONYARA con los 14 Alcaldes rojos rojitos #YaracuyTeCumplioComandante @prensayaracuy pic.twitter.com/DqNOPzXXWF
— Willian Lopez (@W57L) December 11, 2013

Our governor with the 14 red reddish [?] mayors #YaracuyKeptItsPromiseComandante

The 2013 mayoral election results (5): creating codependency on the state yields gains

We are left to wonder how come a country that is so badly ruled, with so much insecurity, with soon a triple digit inflation,  with double digit scarcity index, can still manage to give around 50% of its votes to the people that are spreading misery around.  True, there is an absolute obscene electoral fraud that explains why they actually reach 50%, but the fraud would not work if the regime were not guaranteed, say, at least a 40% of the votes. And 40% of the votes in current conditions is already too much for this blogger to understand. There have been this year countries with less problems than ours that went rioting in the streets (Thailand, Ukraine, Brazil...). And yet Venezuela sees many protests but only from people wanting to solve their own issues, not caring anything about the collective issues.  For all our problems there has not being anything significant in 2013 as a large scale protest across the country. Not that it will not come, even the Soviet Union eventually fell. But that is another story.

The 2013 mayoral election results (4): overall count for the opposition

This one is going to be short. I am just going to list what I was given as the results in town halls depending on parties.  You need to remember that the CNE is not quite done yet, that appeals may come and that many parties are trying to drive the winners to their side.  Those winners, even if they belong to a given party, are quite aware that they got elected with other party votes and do not mind at all to pretend that their links are not that strong, that in fact they are switch hitters of sort.  A concrete example is Baruta in Caracas. Gerardo Blyde may be from UNT (the Zulia local franchise) but he is very aware that in Baruta half of the votes at least are PJ and that UNT only has a share within the other half.  He will kiss and make nice with  PJ whenever it is required.

This is the list, so far, to the best of my knowledge, with my comments.

Three post mortems

The webpress carries three interesting post postmortems on the Sunday result. What unites them is that they are those appropriate to the closing of an electoral cycle that started in 2010, even if that was not clear at the moment.  I suspect that already when Chavez was running the 2010 legislative campaign he knew that he was sick, or that his economic model was going to run aground at some point soon, eaten by the corruption that he could neither control nor do without since it was the main support beam of his political control apparatus.

The 2013 mayoral election results (3): Voluntad Popular shows its bite

Since in the second entry of this series I dealt with Primero Justicia, arguably the main voting group inside the opposition, I should go to the one that has become yesterday the second biggest force inside the opposition umbrella organization, MUD.  As the CNE slowly releases its last results, hoping that people will not notice that the victory claimed by Maduro is not so, we learn that the opposition has increased its share of mayors to 68 (+3 MAS dissidents, thus for a total so far of 71). The quantity may still seem low but that quality is quite something else. But that is for another entry.

Today in a press communique Voluntad Popular, the party led by Leopoldo Lopez, has announced that 18 new mayors are issued from its ranks. That is, 18 out of 71 which gives 25%. Not bad for a brand new party that had 0% last Saturday. Even Hinterlaces, the now chavista pollster called them "batacazo", surprise winner. And four of these town halls are big prizes. Well, not the biggest prizes but certainly fair ones.

The 2013 mayoral election results (2): a bad day for Primero Justicia and Capriles

To start looking into the different results and making interpretations it is important to keep in mind a few things. For example, there are no legal elections scheduled for a couple of years, the National Assembly being the next ones for December 2015. Certainly with a regime as it is we can always expect a referendum, a recall something, etc. But it is clear that even a constitutional assembly is a long reach for an opposition that cannot keep its voters motivated. It requires A LOT of motivation to go to a constitutional assembly and not only Capriles failed to make this election a referendum on Maduro, a lousy president if any, but he lost about 2 million voters that went to the mall, watched TV, etc. That chavismo has as many refusing to show up is no consolation.  Thus we are going to have to live with what we have now: 3 governors, not even a quarter of mayors, and no TV. It is going to be a long two years in which the regime will make sure that the opposition does not get the means to finance an election, any election, even one for condominium chair if possible. This way the dictatorship can pretend to pass as a democracy knowing that it cannot lose elections.

The 2013 mayoral election results (1): general considerations

For many reasons this blog did not cover in depth the campaign for this municipal elections, which for simplicity in the title of this series I will call "mayoral" even though there is a need to look into some interesting local councilor results.  However, analyzing the results can be done with more leisure, relying in part on past knowledge. Before starting with the details, a brief and general evaluation, starting with my own "predictions".

December 2013 election day post

10:27 PM

I think that I need to close this election day post now. All is quiet and analysis start. However I will leave you with food for thought:

Tibisay's lecture even for those who boycotted it like I did, reeks of massaging the corpse. That is, the CNE seems, to me anyway, to have picked up the most favorable results to chavismo and presented only those, leaving for us to add it up later the less favorable and truly evaluate what happened today.  When all is said and done, we can also observe that the obscene advantage of the regime and its lack of scruples in breaking commerce and shop owners for electoral purposes has paid off in part, in particular in Caracas where Ledezma victory seems weaker than what it was a month ago.

10:16 PM

Details:

Opposition takes back Valencia (no surprise) but fails in Maracay (not unsurprising since the natural candidate Mardo was barred).
Barquisimeto to MUD, great victory.
Barinas, of Chavezlandia goes opposition, major insult!!!!!
Maracaibo and Caracas at large are retained (as it should have been).

More later.

Interactive feature for Sunday results

Since I will not be able to start an election day post until late in the afternoon, and since many readers look forward to such post (they are the most visited posts of the blog) I have come up quickly with a pseudo interactive feature to entertain yourselves until I come back in line.

Keller polls on Maduro's illegitimacy

There are many ways to conduct an electoral poll. In general you ask folks for whom they plan to vote and apply the acknowledged corrections to predict who is going to win. This works more or less but it tends to at least predict the winner, the margins of victory being the major problem. Or you can ask voters who did they vote for. After the fact and totally useless for us, but good for a pollsters as a way to control their polling methods when the vote is still fresh in mind.

This is what Keller did, who used to be my favorite pollster before I decided to send all of the them to the dumpsters. At least Keller still has the saving grace that on long term trends he is one of the best, only lacking when he wants to apply them to tomorrow's result. But that is another story.

What happened today: the post-Chavez regime digs in and scales up repression

Certainly today's headline is the Venezuelan High Court, TSJ, emitting one of its most shameful decisions ever (and the competition is stiff). But three other events today are equally telling and all put together are true reasons to worry.

Gladys Gutierrez,
the new chavismo head bitch, dye job and all...

Let's start with the headline. The TSJ had to make a decision on the challenge to the election of last April. The problem it faced is that any decision that would imply an actual revision of voting conditions for last April would without a doubt open a can of worms. There were already two clearly established electoral irregularities that did not require lengthy study: people accompanied forcibly to vote, on video, and the lists of people "dead" that did vote. Those two, by themselves, were enough to erase the "vote advantage" of Maduro in April and examination of the other claims would reveal that Maduro lost. The TSJ, formed by regime's place holders who simply sign decisions written by political agents, were in an impossible situation: accepting to review the challenges was opening the door for proving the illegitimacy of Maduro; refusing to review the challenges was tantamount to recognize that fraud had taken place. They chose a variation of the second, which is that the 10 electoral challenges were ill written and groundless, thus inadmissible for examination. The 10 challenges! As if all lawyers of the opposition were equally incompetent! As if the videos and death roll did not exist! As if what international observers reported on April 14 was misguided!

The opposition challenges 2,320,490 votes of April 14 (15.4% votes cast, margin of victory 1.49% votes cast)

A few days ago Capriles challenged the whole election.

Today, there were quite a few voting centers which results of April 14 where directly challenged. In short, what the opposition demands is that the vote is repeated in those centers which are enough to not only reverse the result of last April but could give Capriles a better margin of victory than what Maduro claims (amen of the voters loss the regime has experienced in two weeks).

The Maduro "election" is officially challenged (impugnada), and so is the electoral system

As promised we just read that the Henrique Capriles has officially challenged/impugnado the election of April 14. he did that by sending the Comando Simon Bolivar, his electoral organization, to the high court of Venezuela, TSJ, electoral hall, with a 180 pages document. The evidence will be introduced later, as the High court proceeds with the hearings.

But that is not all. The challenge is not only on the mere result: the opposition has challenged ALL the electoral process, from weeks before the election to the following days. what is on trial is not only the result of April 14, it is all the Venezuelan Electoral system. At long last.

What can we expect?

Electoral fraud mode confirmed: it is in who voted, how many times they voted, where they voted

Wrecking her life work at the very end,
and in pink innocent girl!

It came as no surprise a few minutes ago: the CNE has announced that the audit it will allow DOES NOT include the books where voters must sign after they vote. Nor apparently the system that gets your fingerprints. In other words it is a useless audit because it  indeed will count the votes that were cast but does not account for those that were allowed to cast proper votes.

What are the implications?

The April 14 2013 results: chavismo loses the metro areas, often big time

The more noteworthy result of Sunday 14 is that with electoral cheating and all, the regime admits that it has lost the control of the major urban agglomerations. That is, the victory of Maduro, if we can call that a victory, comes from places with less than a few dozen thousand folks. These places are much likely to depend on state largess for their survival (Misiones) whereas urban centers dispose of more qualified workers, more artisans, more professional  trades, more educated people and also more "rich" people, but now a relative minority in the new coalition the opposition is building.

In other words, what we have been seeing for a long time: the more educated people are, the more dependent they are on their skills and hard work to make a living, the less likely they are to vote for Chavez, or his heirs for that matter. Let's look out now at the numbers.

The April 14 2013 result: the Caucagüita story

I was wondering whether to analyze the electoral results of last Sunday. After all, there is a fraud. But then again, I've never taken CNE results truly at face value and only found their worth in indicating trends away from chavismo, stuff that even manipulated data cannot hide. So I have decided to make only two posts, this is the first one, retaking my poster community, Caucagüita.

Senseless repression but the beginning of some common sense, maybe, in Venezuela

The day has been marked by two things: an increase in repression moving into outright fascism, and at the end of the day the beginning of some good sense with the CNE accepting to backpedal its earlier stony stance.