Carter Center Report on an Analysis of the Representativeness of the Second Audit Sample, and the Correlation between Petition Signers and the Yes Vote in the Aug. 15, 2004 Presidential Recall Referendum in Venezuela
This study was conducted by The Carter Center and confirmed by the OAS in response to a written request from Sumate presented to The Carter Center Sept. 7, 2004. Sumate asked that The Carter Center evaluate a study performed by Professors Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto Rigobon.
The Hausmann/Rigobon study states the second audit conducted Aug. 18-20 and observed by The Carter Center and the OAS was based on a sample that was not random and representative of the universe of all voting centers using voting machines in the Aug. 15, 2004, recall referendum. 1 The study further indicates that the correlation coefficient (elasticity) for the correlation between the signers and the YES votes for the sample was 10 percent higher than that for the universe. The Hausmann/Rigobon study came to these conclusions through an analysis of the exit poll data, petition signers data, and electoral results data provided by Sumate.
1 Objectives of the Carter Center Study
1. Determine the correlation between the number of signers of the presidential recall petition and the electoral results of the Aug. 15 recall referendum.
2. Compare the characteristics of the universe of voting machine results with those of the sample for the 2nd audit performed Aug. 18.
3. Determine the universe from which the sample generation program used Aug. 18 was drawn.
[...]
5 Conclusions
The sample drawing program used Aug. 18 to generate the 2nd audit sample generated a random sample from the universe of all mesas (voting stations) with automated voting machines. The sample was not drawn from a group of pre-selected mesas. This sample accurately represents different properties of the universe, including the accuracy of the machines, the total YES and NO votes and the correlation between the YES votes and signer turnout.
There is a high correlation between the number of YES votes per voting center and the number of signers of the presidential recall request per voting center; the places where more signatures were collected also are the places where more YES votes were cast. There is no anomaly in the characteristics of the YES votes when compared to the presumed intention of the signers to recall the president.
The second audit showed a high accuracy of the voting machines with discrepancies of less than 0.1 percent. The sample was analyzed, and it does not have different properties than the universe. The sample generation program was analyzed as part of the 2nd audit process and again in this study. Both studies showed that the sample does not operate on a subset of the universe, thus hiding or masquerading some of the properties of the universe. Consequently the results of the 2nd audit accurately confirm the electoral results of Aug. 15.
Download a PDF of the full report
September 17, 2004
September 14, 2004
Things that make you go "hmmmm"...
From today's Por Mi Madre, the daily political gossip page in TalCual,
Final poll
The final tracking poll for Consultores 21, carried out on August 13th in the nine largest cities in the country [but which could not be published due to CNE restrictions on late poll announcements -ft], showed the NO side leading the SI by 52.9% to 47.1% - a lead of 5.8 points. Official CNE returns for those same nine cities show NO leading by 53.1% vs. 46.9% for the SI. The official NO lead of 6.2% is very close to the Consultores 21 measure, and corroborates how closely matched the sides are in urban centers.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Final poll
The final tracking poll for Consultores 21, carried out on August 13th in the nine largest cities in the country [but which could not be published due to CNE restrictions on late poll announcements -ft], showed the NO side leading the SI by 52.9% to 47.1% - a lead of 5.8 points. Official CNE returns for those same nine cities show NO leading by 53.1% vs. 46.9% for the SI. The official NO lead of 6.2% is very close to the Consultores 21 measure, and corroborates how closely matched the sides are in urban centers.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Magna Carta and the Subtle Art of Chavista Budgeting
In Spanish the phrase "Carta Magna" is just a synonym for "constitution," so most Venezuelans probably don't know that if you dig a bit into the etymology of the term, you find that it comes from Magna Carta, which was a specific historical document, a kind of XIII century "Pacto de Punto Fijo" between King John and the English aristocracy.
Magna Carta for the first time limited the rights of the monarch, established trial by jury, the beginnings of habeas corpus, and the principle of parliamentary control over state spending - the power of the purse-strings. 600 years ahead of the pack, the brits started to move away from the principle of absolute monarchy, and towards a system where the executive power was accountable to a body other than itself.
Probably the most radical departure in Magna Carta was this idea - revolutionary for medieval Europe - that the King needed to get permission from another body in order to levy taxes and spend state money. By starting the long process it took to shift the "power of the purse strings" from monarch to parliament, Magna Carta radically altered the notion of state power. Kings could no longer spend autonomously - spenditure had to be justified, argued over, haggled over and agreed with an assembly the King could not always control. It was this reform, arguably more than any other, that started the long process of declawing the British monarchy. You can't have absolutism if you don't control your checkbook.
Slowly but surely the principle of parliamentary control over state spending spread throughout the world, first establishing itself in the U.S. constitution, and from there, to the rest of the world. Today, every democracy in the world works on the basis of a State Budget Law, approved like any other law by the legislative branch. The haggling process it takes to approve budget laws is a key check against the accumulation of undue power in a single set of hands.
Alas, 800 years of British common sense and the worldwide trend in its direction are just two of the victims of the chavista revolution. In Venezuela, parliamentary control over state spending is a dead letter - just another of the many articles written into the constitution and swiftly forgotten - and exhibit A in the case for those who argue Chavez is an autocrat.
The political takeover of PDVSA ought to be seen in this light. Under the old system, PDVSA would sell oil, take the earnings and transfer them over to the state through royalties, taxes and dividends. Once that money had come into state coffers, the government would spend them through its usual budgeting procedures - which would allow the formal parliamentary control of state spending. The new system, on the other hand, does an end run around normal budgeting procedures. In fact, standard procedure now is for PDVSA to sell oil, take its earnings and spend it directly, in accordance with the president's instructions, without ever going through state coffers or normal budgeting procedures. There is no chance for the people's elected representatives in the National Assembly to question the discretionary use of these monies. Behind the lofty rhetoric about the revolution's liberation of the oil company hides an assault against one of the most basic principles of democratic coexistence.
As Pompeyo described in the article I posted yesterday, this trend reaches its most grotesque extremes on "Alo Presidente", where Chavez tosses around state money like it's going out of style, without even a pretense, a fig-leaf of parliamentary control. It bears noting that this is openly illegal and unconstitutional - Article 162 of Chavez's beloved little blue book clearly establishes Parliamentary control over spending. Like many other similar, blatant violations of the constitution, this one does not prevent Chavez from using the little blue book propagandistically, as the rhetorical cornerstone of his entire governing project. It's pretty rhetoric, but it's also an unambiguous, bold-faced, zero-shame lie, with a cherry on top.
But do we hear any sign of dissent from the president's fans on this matter? Not a peep!
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Magna Carta for the first time limited the rights of the monarch, established trial by jury, the beginnings of habeas corpus, and the principle of parliamentary control over state spending - the power of the purse-strings. 600 years ahead of the pack, the brits started to move away from the principle of absolute monarchy, and towards a system where the executive power was accountable to a body other than itself.
Probably the most radical departure in Magna Carta was this idea - revolutionary for medieval Europe - that the King needed to get permission from another body in order to levy taxes and spend state money. By starting the long process it took to shift the "power of the purse strings" from monarch to parliament, Magna Carta radically altered the notion of state power. Kings could no longer spend autonomously - spenditure had to be justified, argued over, haggled over and agreed with an assembly the King could not always control. It was this reform, arguably more than any other, that started the long process of declawing the British monarchy. You can't have absolutism if you don't control your checkbook.
Slowly but surely the principle of parliamentary control over state spending spread throughout the world, first establishing itself in the U.S. constitution, and from there, to the rest of the world. Today, every democracy in the world works on the basis of a State Budget Law, approved like any other law by the legislative branch. The haggling process it takes to approve budget laws is a key check against the accumulation of undue power in a single set of hands.
Alas, 800 years of British common sense and the worldwide trend in its direction are just two of the victims of the chavista revolution. In Venezuela, parliamentary control over state spending is a dead letter - just another of the many articles written into the constitution and swiftly forgotten - and exhibit A in the case for those who argue Chavez is an autocrat.
The political takeover of PDVSA ought to be seen in this light. Under the old system, PDVSA would sell oil, take the earnings and transfer them over to the state through royalties, taxes and dividends. Once that money had come into state coffers, the government would spend them through its usual budgeting procedures - which would allow the formal parliamentary control of state spending. The new system, on the other hand, does an end run around normal budgeting procedures. In fact, standard procedure now is for PDVSA to sell oil, take its earnings and spend it directly, in accordance with the president's instructions, without ever going through state coffers or normal budgeting procedures. There is no chance for the people's elected representatives in the National Assembly to question the discretionary use of these monies. Behind the lofty rhetoric about the revolution's liberation of the oil company hides an assault against one of the most basic principles of democratic coexistence.
As Pompeyo described in the article I posted yesterday, this trend reaches its most grotesque extremes on "Alo Presidente", where Chavez tosses around state money like it's going out of style, without even a pretense, a fig-leaf of parliamentary control. It bears noting that this is openly illegal and unconstitutional - Article 162 of Chavez's beloved little blue book clearly establishes Parliamentary control over spending. Like many other similar, blatant violations of the constitution, this one does not prevent Chavez from using the little blue book propagandistically, as the rhetorical cornerstone of his entire governing project. It's pretty rhetoric, but it's also an unambiguous, bold-faced, zero-shame lie, with a cherry on top.
But do we hear any sign of dissent from the president's fans on this matter? Not a peep!
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 13, 2004
Reminiscences of things present
Reposted from El Informador de Barquisimeto
A Militarist Vision
by Pompeyo Marquez, Sept. 3, 2004
Translated by FT
I have argued that we are facing an authoritarian and militarist autocracy. A chavista friend has told me that it's an exageration, so I want to expose my reasons.
First, the meaning of autocracy is all power concentrated in one man. If we examine the way the state works today, there is no denying the way Chavez interferes with every part of it, at times publicly and harshly. This fact is underlined by the virtual liquidation of the judicial branch with the approval of the amendments to the Framework Law of the Supreme Tribunal which, a chavista leader told me, doesn't worry them at all, since the Nominations' Committee will be headed by [chavista die-hard] Pedro Carreño, meaning that ultimately it'll be Chavez who chooses all 32 TSJ magistrates.
When I say the president's actions are "authoritarian", it's enough to watch his TV-show "Alo presidente" to find the most varied evidence of the way he leads the country in every field. He doesn't coordinate a team, he has underlings. A former minister tells me that, when he was in office, he could not control his own schedule, because the president could call him to Miraflores at any time and he might have to wait two or three hours for an audience, or he might call him at 5 a.m. to go on a trip that day, which would wreck his work plan. It's worth pointing out that he has no notion of laws such as the Budget, the Salvaguarda [anti-corruption] or Comptrollership laws. In a recent meeting broadcast nationally [cadena] with a group of entrepreneurs, you saw him turn to Merentes: "how much money do you have?" He replies, " Bs.1.3 billion." "Well, lets take 600 and give them to these people." Chavez really does act as though he owned the country and the national treasury.
On militarism, everyone can see the people he has chosen to stand for state governorship - 14 officers - leaving aside the civilian leadership in the government camp. All this does is generate anger in those states. I'll take two examples of the sorts of provocations these communities have been subjected to: in Carabobo, he has chosen "General Burp", Acosta Carles, and in Zulia, General Gutierrez, who barely knows the main avenues in Maracaibo. And lets not mention the numerous civilian posts held today by Armed Forces officers. Not even during the Perez Jimenez dictatorship had there been so many military men holding public office. And the latest stunt just tops it all off: the government has ordered the army to make a register of idle lands, since apparently the National Lands Institute and the Agriculture Ministry are entirely useless.
In 1956, I was in Russia when Kruschev published his report condemning Stalin's crimes and his cult of personality. Then and there, I swore that I would never participate in the cult of a strongman, which remains the explanation I give to chavistas for my position today. At the same time, I remind you that in 1998 I said electing Chavez was a jump in the dark.
Me? I learned to participate in democratic give-and-take, to understand pluralism and to oppose all enforced thought [pensamiento unico], all monolithic thinking, like the one Chavez wants to establish. I learned the value of tolerance, of respect for your adversaries and for divergent opinions, as I show daily. I learned that Venezuela needs its institutions to function democratically, and that democracy must have a social content for the majority.
And that's the struggle I'm in now, as more than half the country is victim of electoral fraud, of the insolent use of the resources of power in order to maintain that power. The struggle is ongoing until the objectives are met, and it should be carried out in every sphere, whether parliamentary, electoral, political, social or labor-related. We must not give up on any of the positions we've held to, quite the opposite: we must strengthen and broaden them. This is the course that experience recommends.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
A Militarist Vision
by Pompeyo Marquez, Sept. 3, 2004
Translated by FT
I have argued that we are facing an authoritarian and militarist autocracy. A chavista friend has told me that it's an exageration, so I want to expose my reasons.
First, the meaning of autocracy is all power concentrated in one man. If we examine the way the state works today, there is no denying the way Chavez interferes with every part of it, at times publicly and harshly. This fact is underlined by the virtual liquidation of the judicial branch with the approval of the amendments to the Framework Law of the Supreme Tribunal which, a chavista leader told me, doesn't worry them at all, since the Nominations' Committee will be headed by [chavista die-hard] Pedro Carreño, meaning that ultimately it'll be Chavez who chooses all 32 TSJ magistrates.
When I say the president's actions are "authoritarian", it's enough to watch his TV-show "Alo presidente" to find the most varied evidence of the way he leads the country in every field. He doesn't coordinate a team, he has underlings. A former minister tells me that, when he was in office, he could not control his own schedule, because the president could call him to Miraflores at any time and he might have to wait two or three hours for an audience, or he might call him at 5 a.m. to go on a trip that day, which would wreck his work plan. It's worth pointing out that he has no notion of laws such as the Budget, the Salvaguarda [anti-corruption] or Comptrollership laws. In a recent meeting broadcast nationally [cadena] with a group of entrepreneurs, you saw him turn to Merentes: "how much money do you have?" He replies, " Bs.1.3 billion." "Well, lets take 600 and give them to these people." Chavez really does act as though he owned the country and the national treasury.
On militarism, everyone can see the people he has chosen to stand for state governorship - 14 officers - leaving aside the civilian leadership in the government camp. All this does is generate anger in those states. I'll take two examples of the sorts of provocations these communities have been subjected to: in Carabobo, he has chosen "General Burp", Acosta Carles, and in Zulia, General Gutierrez, who barely knows the main avenues in Maracaibo. And lets not mention the numerous civilian posts held today by Armed Forces officers. Not even during the Perez Jimenez dictatorship had there been so many military men holding public office. And the latest stunt just tops it all off: the government has ordered the army to make a register of idle lands, since apparently the National Lands Institute and the Agriculture Ministry are entirely useless.
In 1956, I was in Russia when Kruschev published his report condemning Stalin's crimes and his cult of personality. Then and there, I swore that I would never participate in the cult of a strongman, which remains the explanation I give to chavistas for my position today. At the same time, I remind you that in 1998 I said electing Chavez was a jump in the dark.
Me? I learned to participate in democratic give-and-take, to understand pluralism and to oppose all enforced thought [pensamiento unico], all monolithic thinking, like the one Chavez wants to establish. I learned the value of tolerance, of respect for your adversaries and for divergent opinions, as I show daily. I learned that Venezuela needs its institutions to function democratically, and that democracy must have a social content for the majority.
And that's the struggle I'm in now, as more than half the country is victim of electoral fraud, of the insolent use of the resources of power in order to maintain that power. The struggle is ongoing until the objectives are met, and it should be carried out in every sphere, whether parliamentary, electoral, political, social or labor-related. We must not give up on any of the positions we've held to, quite the opposite: we must strengthen and broaden them. This is the course that experience recommends.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 10, 2004
The Elasticity of the Vote for Dummies
Hausmann and Rigobon's argument about the non-randomness of the CNE cold-audit sample is based on something they've called the "elasticity of the vote." The concept is borrowed from economics, where price elasticity is a bedrock conceptual tool. This is my academic turf, so I'll have a stab at explaining it to non-economists.
According to a standard economics textbook, price elasticity of demand is "a measure of the responsiveness of the quantity demanded of a good to changes in price." (Stiglitz and Boadway, 1994).
Very good, but what the hell does it mean?
A caffeinated illustration
Say a cup of coffee in your town costs $1. At that price, you buy 100 cups of coffee a year. Now say coffee prices go down to 75 cents a cup. At that price, how many cups of coffee will you buy per year? Logically, more than 100. But how many more?
Well, maybe you're very sensitive to price changes, and you'll buy 200 cups of coffee a year: your demand is relatively elastic - since a 25% drop in price led to a 100% rise in consumption. Or maybe you're not so concerned about price changes and you'll buy just 105 cups a year - then your demand is relatively inelastic.
Of course, economists don't care how much coffee you personally drink, they care how much coffee a whole bunch of people drink. So the question is not how your demand for coffee will react to a change in price, but how overall demand for coffee will react to a change in price.
Say you do a study and you find that when the cost of coffee goes down 25 cents, on average people will buy 20 cups of coffee more per year than before. The ratio of the coffees-people-used-to-drink to coffees-people-drink-now now is 100:120.
Now, say you take a random sample from that population. How many more cups of coffee per year would you expect the sample to buy?
Well, if the sample is truly random, you would expect it to react in the same way as the overall population - the sample ratio should be 100:120 as well.
But say your sample doesn't behave that way. Say the people in your sample are now buying 130, or 140 cups of coffee a year. What can you conclude then?
Well, at the very least you can say the coffee drinkers in your sample behave differently from the overall population of coffee drinkers. Your sample acts as though they are more sensitive to coffee price changes than the people in the overall population - in economist-talk, their demand is relatively more elastic than the demand of the rest of the population.
So something screwy is going on...at the very least, you have reason to suspect that your sample was not really randomly selected from the total population of coffee drinkers.
The key thing to remember is that statistical methods allow you to estimate the exact probability that your sample, which seems at first glance to be non-random, actually is random - but just happened to give you a screwy-seeming result by chance.
Applying this idea to the cold-audit data
Now, Hausmann and Rigobon's study of the cold audit relies on an adaptation of the same train of thought. They have three data-sets: one on the November 2003 signature gathering drive, one with CNE's total referendum results, and one on the referendum results in the sample selected for the cold audit.
All they're doing is comparing two ratios: the ratio of 2003 signatures to Si-votes in the overall CNE results, and the ratio of 2003 signatures to Si-votes in the audited sample. If the audit sample truly was random, the two ratios should be reasonably close to one another.
They're not.
Say you determine that, for the overall population of voters, every 100 signatures obtained in November 2003 yielded 120 Si-votes. The ratio for the entire population is 100:120. Now cold-audit day comes around, and CNE chooses a supposedly random sample of voting centers. But when you compare the signatures-to-Si-votes ratio in the audited voting centers, you realize that it's different from the signatures-to-Si-votes ratio in the overall population: say 100:140 instead of 100:120.
[Note: these are not the actual numbers - H&R's analysis was rather more sophisticated, including a correction term to account for the growth of the voting population and a log scale transformation - so the numbers I'm using are just meant to illustrate the point.]
What can you conclude from that difference in the ratios?
The exact same thing you could conclude in the case of the coffee drinkers...and for the exact same reason!
The relationship between willingness-to-sign-in-2003 and willingness-to-vote-Si-in-2004 should be the same for a random sample than for the overall population. Yet, for some not-yet-explained reason, each Nov. 2003 signature yields more Si-votes in the audited center than in the non-audited ones.
The question, then, is what are the chances that a gap that big between the two ratios is the product of pure chance? Luckily, as we've seen, statistical methods allow you to estimate this probability quite precisely. In this case, Hausmann and Rigobon peg the chances of these results happening by coincidence at less than 1%.
That means that if you pick a sample at random, more than 99 times out of 100 you'll end up with a ratio less odd than the one CNE happened to get.
Ergo, there's it's more than 99% likely that the audit sample wasn't really random.
Does that make sense?
Join a moderated debate on this post.
According to a standard economics textbook, price elasticity of demand is "a measure of the responsiveness of the quantity demanded of a good to changes in price." (Stiglitz and Boadway, 1994).
Very good, but what the hell does it mean?
A caffeinated illustration
Say a cup of coffee in your town costs $1. At that price, you buy 100 cups of coffee a year. Now say coffee prices go down to 75 cents a cup. At that price, how many cups of coffee will you buy per year? Logically, more than 100. But how many more?
Well, maybe you're very sensitive to price changes, and you'll buy 200 cups of coffee a year: your demand is relatively elastic - since a 25% drop in price led to a 100% rise in consumption. Or maybe you're not so concerned about price changes and you'll buy just 105 cups a year - then your demand is relatively inelastic.
Of course, economists don't care how much coffee you personally drink, they care how much coffee a whole bunch of people drink. So the question is not how your demand for coffee will react to a change in price, but how overall demand for coffee will react to a change in price.
Say you do a study and you find that when the cost of coffee goes down 25 cents, on average people will buy 20 cups of coffee more per year than before. The ratio of the coffees-people-used-to-drink to coffees-people-drink-now now is 100:120.
Now, say you take a random sample from that population. How many more cups of coffee per year would you expect the sample to buy?
Well, if the sample is truly random, you would expect it to react in the same way as the overall population - the sample ratio should be 100:120 as well.
But say your sample doesn't behave that way. Say the people in your sample are now buying 130, or 140 cups of coffee a year. What can you conclude then?
Well, at the very least you can say the coffee drinkers in your sample behave differently from the overall population of coffee drinkers. Your sample acts as though they are more sensitive to coffee price changes than the people in the overall population - in economist-talk, their demand is relatively more elastic than the demand of the rest of the population.
So something screwy is going on...at the very least, you have reason to suspect that your sample was not really randomly selected from the total population of coffee drinkers.
The key thing to remember is that statistical methods allow you to estimate the exact probability that your sample, which seems at first glance to be non-random, actually is random - but just happened to give you a screwy-seeming result by chance.
Applying this idea to the cold-audit data
Now, Hausmann and Rigobon's study of the cold audit relies on an adaptation of the same train of thought. They have three data-sets: one on the November 2003 signature gathering drive, one with CNE's total referendum results, and one on the referendum results in the sample selected for the cold audit.
All they're doing is comparing two ratios: the ratio of 2003 signatures to Si-votes in the overall CNE results, and the ratio of 2003 signatures to Si-votes in the audited sample. If the audit sample truly was random, the two ratios should be reasonably close to one another.
They're not.
Say you determine that, for the overall population of voters, every 100 signatures obtained in November 2003 yielded 120 Si-votes. The ratio for the entire population is 100:120. Now cold-audit day comes around, and CNE chooses a supposedly random sample of voting centers. But when you compare the signatures-to-Si-votes ratio in the audited voting centers, you realize that it's different from the signatures-to-Si-votes ratio in the overall population: say 100:140 instead of 100:120.
[Note: these are not the actual numbers - H&R's analysis was rather more sophisticated, including a correction term to account for the growth of the voting population and a log scale transformation - so the numbers I'm using are just meant to illustrate the point.]
What can you conclude from that difference in the ratios?
The exact same thing you could conclude in the case of the coffee drinkers...and for the exact same reason!
The relationship between willingness-to-sign-in-2003 and willingness-to-vote-Si-in-2004 should be the same for a random sample than for the overall population. Yet, for some not-yet-explained reason, each Nov. 2003 signature yields more Si-votes in the audited center than in the non-audited ones.
The question, then, is what are the chances that a gap that big between the two ratios is the product of pure chance? Luckily, as we've seen, statistical methods allow you to estimate this probability quite precisely. In this case, Hausmann and Rigobon peg the chances of these results happening by coincidence at less than 1%.
That means that if you pick a sample at random, more than 99 times out of 100 you'll end up with a ratio less odd than the one CNE happened to get.
Ergo, there's it's more than 99% likely that the audit sample wasn't really random.
Does that make sense?
Join a moderated debate on this post.
The Zenith of the Egghead Brigade
Thanks to Miguel Octavio for linking to this astonishing New York Times article on Benford's law.
Dr. Theodore P. Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results. The following day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students' amazement, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses.
"The truth is," he said in an interview, "most people don't know the real odds of such an exercise, so they can't fake data convincingly."
More...
Seems to me like Miguel is really enjoying this moment of maximum relevance and exposure for the Egghead Brigade. Good! There's a kind of poetic rightness to it - the fraud hypothesis will be made or sunk, in the end, not by some rambling CD fourth republic dinosaur, but by a scientist, by some mild mannered academic who's spent the last 30 years working quietly, diligently behind a computer screen. Chavez is powerful. Science, much more so.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Dr. Theodore P. Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results. The following day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students' amazement, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses.
"The truth is," he said in an interview, "most people don't know the real odds of such an exercise, so they can't fake data convincingly."
More...
Seems to me like Miguel is really enjoying this moment of maximum relevance and exposure for the Egghead Brigade. Good! There's a kind of poetic rightness to it - the fraud hypothesis will be made or sunk, in the end, not by some rambling CD fourth republic dinosaur, but by a scientist, by some mild mannered academic who's spent the last 30 years working quietly, diligently behind a computer screen. Chavez is powerful. Science, much more so.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 8, 2004
Pre-emptive Strike: Anticipating the Counterarguments to Hausmann and Rigobon
I've been reading and re-reading Hausmann and Rigobon's piece to try to find holes in it. I'm finding it hard. The most obvious counterargument doesn't seem to work...and the conspiracy theories needed to explain them seem particularly far-fetched.
Obvious Counterargument 1: JIJO - Junk In, Junk Out.
Chavistas have held that the opposition run exit polls were very badly conducted, and that it's a mistake to take them seriously. The first part of the Hausmann/Rigobon analysis is based partly on exit-poll results. But as everyone knows, if you start with junk data, you end up with junk results. JIJO.
You have to work through the logic of Hausmann and Rigobon's argument to see off this challenge. What their paper argues is empathically not that the exit poll results do not match the election results, but rather that the error given by the exit polls is positively correlated with the error given by the Nov. 2003 signature collection drive. As these two estimators are independent of one another - their sources of error are unrelated - the only way to account for positive correlation in their errors is fraud.
What the hell does all of that mean?
Well, start with the Nov. 2003 Signature count. In some sense, the signatures are predictors of the number of SI votes in a subsequent election. If, for instance, you collected 1000 signatures in a signing center in November, you would expect a similar number of Si votes in that voting center this year. The correlation will not be perfect, but it's something. You would not expect to get 200 SI votes in such a center, and neither would you expect 2000.
Then take the exit-polls. Again, you would expect them to be correlated - imperfectly - with the ultimate election results. There will be error, as there always is with any estimator, but the poll gives you an idea of voting intentions.
Now, what Hausmann and Rigobon have done is take these two estimators and analyze them together. And what they find is quite interesting: in some voting centers, the two estimators work quite well. But in other centers, the estimators are wrong - they predict more SI votes than CNE eventually reported. What's more, in a given center, when one estimator is wrong, the other one also tends to get that center wrong - and both in the same direction, of overestimating the number of SI votes.
Or, in their words, "in those places where the signatures are proportionally more wrong in predicting more Si votes than those obtained, the exit polls do the same."
So, say CNE reports only 800 SI votes in our hypothetical voting center that had 1000 signatures back in November. Well, ok, that might be possible - maybe 200 voters there decided to become chavistas. But imagine that the Sumate or PJ exit poll also estimates 1000 votes for that center - or 950, or 1100. Well, then you have a strange situation: it's not immediately clear why both estimators would make the same mistake in the same direction. "Because both measures are independent," they explain "what they have in common is the fraud. "
Of course, if this had happened in just one or two voting centers, you could put it down as a fluke. But Hausmann and Rigobon find it happening systematically across a whole swathe of voting centers.
They peg the chances of this pattern stemming from a random coincidence at less than 1%.
Now, what this means is that if the Sumate and PJ exit polls are wrong, they're wrong in a really funny and strange way. They're more wrong for some voting centers than for others. You could say that Sumate and PJ just happened to have some competent exit pollsters and some incompetent ones, so it makes sense that some got the results more wrong than others. But what you can't explain with that argument is why those Incompetent Pollsters ended up getting sent specifically to the voting centers where the number of Si votes also happened to be lower than one would expect from an analysis of the November 2003 signature patterns.
I can't see any easy way for CNE to explain this situation - other than asserting a wildly implausible conspiracy stretching all the way back to November 2003 where the opposition would seek to selectively manipulate both the number of signatures and the exit poll results for some voting centers, but not others, so that many months later two fancy US-based professors could keep the reasonable doubt hypothesis going. Now THAT'S UFO stuff!
So I can't see how JIJO applies to this analysis: what's at stake here is neither whether the Nov. 2003 signature collection was clean and valid nor whether the exit polls were well conducted. The mystery in need of explanation is why both of these estimators would be more wrong in some voting centers than in others, why both should coincidentally be more wrong in the same set of voting centers, and why they should both be wrong in the same direction - of undercounting the number of SI votes.
Hausmann and Rigobon can think of one neat, parsimonious little hypothesis to explain all of these questions: fraud.
If you can come up with a better one, do let us know...
Note: As statistics is not my forte, it's perfectly possible I've screwed something up in this post. Don't be shy to let me know if I did, so I can correct it: caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 7, 2004
Hausmann and Rigobon: The incomprehensible, the evident and the damning
Hausmann and Rigobon's paper on the evidence of fraud in the Recall Referendum makes three basic arguments. Instant reaction.
1.The Incomprehensible.
Hausmann and Rigobon claim that a sophisticated statistical method comparing exit poll data and Nov. 2003 signature totals with CNE results generates evidence of fraud.
They set out to "develop a statistical technique to identify whether there are signs of fraud in the data." This is how they describe the method they used:
"We depart from all previous work on the subject which was based on finding patterns in the voting numbers. Instead, we look for two independent variables that are imperfect correlates of the intention of voters. Fraud is nothing other than a deviation between the voters' intention and the actual count. Since each variable used is correlated with the intention, but not with the fraud we can develop a test as to whether fraud is present. In other words, each of our two independent measures of the intention to vote predicts the actual number of votes imperfectly. If there is no fraud, the errors these two measures generate would not be correlated, as they each would make mistakes for different reasons. However, if there is fraud, the variables would make larger mistakes where the fraud was bigger and hence the errors would be positively correlated. The paper shows that these errors are highly correlated and that the probability that this is pure chance is again less than 1 percent."
The statistical methods employed to come to this conclusion are sophisticated beyond my ability to analyze. I imagine it would be possible to argue that Sumate and Primero Justicia's exit polls were so flawed, that what we have here is a classic case of JIJO: Junk In, Junk Out. But since I couldn't understand the analysis, I can't really judge it - I have to take Hausmann and Rigobon at their word.
2-The Evident
The analysis discards the Si-cap hypothesis.
This had always seemed to me as a weak argument, partly because the evidence was ambiguous, but mostly because it made no sense to me that CNE would plan out a big, complex, sophisticated fraud operation and then institute a mechanism that would leave such an obvious footprint in the data. I never thought it added up, and neither do Hausmann and Rigobon.
3-The Damning
The study provides statistical evidence that the sample chosen by CNE for the cold-audit was demonstrably not random.
This is the most eye-catching conclusion to the study, and of special concern to me, since I'd consistently held the view that the cold-audit was the strongest card in CNE's hand. If the audit sample was not randomly selected, and the non-randomness fits in neatly with the rest of the fraud hypothesis, then it's the first solid evidence of fraud I've seen yet.
Let me quote again from Hausmann and Rigabon's summary of their argument:
"First of all, the Carter audit, conducted on August 18, was based on a sample of about 1 percent of the ballot boxes. According to the Carter Center, the audit went flawlessly, except for the fact that the Head of the Electoral Council was not willing to use the random number generator suggested by the Carter Center but use instead its own program run on its own computer. At the time, this seemed odd, given that the objective of the audit was to dispel doubts.
"The paper finds that the sample used for the audit was not randomly chosen. In that sample, the relationship between the votes obtained by the opposition on August 15 and the signatures gathered requesting the Referendum in November 2003 was 10 percent higher than in the rest of the boxes. We calculate the probability of this taking place by pure chance at less than 1 percent. In fact, they create 1000 samples of non-audited centers to prove this.
"This result opens the possibility that the fraud was committed only in a subset of the 4580 automated centers, say 3000, and that the audit was successful because it directed the search to the 1580 unaltered centers. That is why it was so important not to use the Carter Center number generator. If this was the case, Carter could never have figured it out."
If this is right - and I have no reason to doubt it, at this point - this would dismantle the main reason to think there was no fraud: namely, that there was no way for CNE to tamper with the paper-ballots after the sample-selection but before international observers got there. There was no way to do it, as I'd thought...but there was also no need to do it: they already knew that the boxes audited would come from "clean" tables!
I've always taken the view here that I don't know if there was fraud or not, cuz I'm not omniscient. What's hard, as a commited antichavista, is to try to come to a judgment on this matter based on evidence rather than ideology or wishful thinking. The Haussman and Rigobon paper is significant precisely because it gives us the first bit of evidence that something was not right with the cold-audit. Having taken the cold-audit as the primary reason to think the election was fair, the paper obviously requires that I go back and reconsider.
One last consideration: if Hausmann and Rigobon are right, then there was no reason for CNE to go back and alter the paper ballots. If CNE did not tamper with the paper ballots, then it follows logically that even now a recount of paper ballots could detect fraud. For many reasons (the security codes printed on each paper ballot by the smartmatic machines, the fact that thermal paper fades over time, the daunting logistics involved, etc.) it would be very hard for CNE to go back now and tamper with the ballots. So even at this late date, it strikes me that the truth is certainly out there: sitting in those ballot boxes, slowly decaying into unreadability.
As a final note: as always, I'm eager to hear a reasoned explanation of how and why it is that Hausmann and Rigobon's analysis is wrong. I am much less eager, however, to hear ad hominem attacks against them, or blithe dismissals of anyone who would spend time inquiring into the fraud hypothesis.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Puro cuarto bate
Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto Rigobon must be the two most respected and accomplished Venezuelan academics out there. You don't get teaching posts at Harvard and MIT for tirar piedras. Yesterday, I got my hands on their study of the fraud hypothesis and, as you'd expect, it makes the most comprehensive and serious case yet for the fraud hypothesis.
I'm not through with the report, and I don't want to comment at length until I've read it all, but one thing I can tell you for sure: there's no dismissing it as "UFO stuff." There are serious charges in here, and they demand serious answers from CNE and CC/OAS. In particular, their assertion that there is statistical evidence that the sample taken by CNE for the cold-audit was not random raises very troubling questions for the authorities.
I recommend reading it carefully.
You can download the paper (pdf format, 1.1 mb) by Hausmann and Rigobon here.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 6, 2004
Alemo, serious planning, and where the hell do you get $60 billion?
One of the most interesting articles I got to write when I lived in Venezuela grew from a meeting I had with five privileged white men who had held positions of some prestige under the old regime. They harshly condemned Chavez's performance in office and called for policy to take a radical new direction. They threw their hands up in frustration as they considered the government's folly, shook their heads gravely as they described their exclusion from the spheres of power, and generally despaired over their powerlessness to influence policy in the slightest.
Alemo
The group's name is Alemo. It was founded in the early 1980s as a think-tank on Venezuela's urban housing crisis. Staffed by professional architects and urban planners - many are professors at the Universidad Central de Venezuela - the group had spent two decades in in-depth study of the urban planning challenge posed by Venezuela's mushrooming shantytowns, or barrios. With a bureaucrat's fastidiousness for detail, they had documented the scale of the problem, thought through the policy alternatives available to the state to respond to it, costed the various possibilities, and published the lot. In their estimation, the rock-bottom, lowest-imaginable price-tag for bringing all of Venezuela's urban dwellers to a basic standard of safety and comfort would come to...wait for it...$60 billion.
The price-tag is astronomical, ludicrous. It's over 60% of GDP, over twice the government's global yearly spending. Even if, as Alemo urges, the cost is spread over 10 years, a $6 billion/year price tag would require quadrupling the country's housing budget - well in excess of the state's ability to pay.
It's hardly a surprise, since Alemo's study points to a desastrous housing shortage and the need for a major project of infrastructure building to redress it. Just to give you a sense of how dire the housing crisis is, consider this: one-third of the country's housing stock consists of ranchos - shanties. However, fully half of all Venezuelans live in ranchos. Thousands of ranchos need to be bulldozed and replaced - they sit on geologically unstable ground, and could give way at the next rainstorm - while hundreds of thousands require investment to bring them up to minimal standards of safety and crowding. Moreover, hundreds of barrios need major investments to bring in basic urban amenities - from electricity and sanitation to schools, infermeries, playing fields and roads good enough for buses to use.
How did Alemo come to this $60 billion figure? The process was long and involved, but the innitial question was simple enough: what would it take to build a Venezuela where everyone who lives in a city has access to basic urban services, nobody lives at very high-risk areas for flooding or mudslides, nobody lives in extremely crowded or dangerously deteriorated housing, and the housing stock grows quickly enough to absorb the new families looking for places of their own as they hit their 20s?
To keep costs more or less reasonable, Alemo applied deep cost-cutting measures in their calculation, including a radical plan for the state to construct "proto-houses" (with all services, but minimal construction area) that residents would subsequently expand and complete, as well as financing mechanisms that would split costs between the state and beneficiary families. So the $6 billion/year tag is a rock-bottom figure, the very least the state could spend and still hope to meet its goals. Spend much less than that, and the problem deepens rather than receding.
"Normally," I remember them telling me, "you'd need to build at least 100,000 new low-income housing units a year - not to reduce current levels of crowding, but just to keep up with population growth - just to stay even. To start to make some headway against the trully appalling level of crowding in some barrios, you'd be talking about 120,000 houses a year, at least. Since the start of the Chavez era, we've never seen more than 60,000/year. So, in effect, we're going backwards: every house that you come up short from that 100,000 target means another family forced to choose between striking out on their own by squatting on an empty plot of land and building a rancho with their hands, or staying put and living in increasingly intolerable crowding with their relatives."
Serious Planning
Of course, this is just one area of concern: expert NGOs could (and have) come up with similar analyses for hospitals, schools, social security, the fire-fighters, the police, essentially any part of Venezuela's huge, overbloated but underfunded state. As a policy-wonk myself, it warms my heart to see the people of Alemo taking a long, hard, careful, uncompromising look at a policy problem like this and then propose specific, costed solutions. There is something reassuring about the mixture of genuine social concern and hard-headed planning in their work - their conviction that the more urgent a human problem is, the more down-to-earth and meticulous should be the planning for a solution. Alemo's proposals represent a hard-bitten marriage of idealism and pragmatism that eschews magical solutions and urges the state to tackle these matters with eyes wide open. It's a message, an attitude, that I can get 100% behind.
Now, how has the Chavez administration responded to Alemo's calls? The answer goes a long ways towards explaining my despair about the next two (or eight, or fourteen) years. First, the government purged Alemo members from Conavi, Fondur, Inavi, and every other state institute dealing with urban housing - putting the state's housing bureaucracy in the hands of doctrinaire chavistas that would neither produce independent estimates or raise troubling questions. Then, it set out to confuse the issue, making oversized claims for its decidedly undersized achievements.
At no point since 1999 has Venezuela come anywhere near to building the 100,000 low income housing units per year that it would take to keep up with population growth, let alone make headway into the housing crisis. Yet the government, conscious that very few people know this, continues to tout its house-building totals - just 25,000 units last year - as major revolutionary triumphs! Stop and think about what this means: last year alone, 75,000 poor Venezuelan families were forced to either build themselves an illegal shanty or stay on in impossibly cramped quarters...and the revolutionary people's government brags about this as a success!
(For next year, the government and the banks have reached an agreement where the government will pitch in $1.4 billion to build 50,000 low-income homes - watch for the headlines next year about the stunning, 100% growth in revolutionary housebuilding!)
What's the purpose of this detour into the minutiae of the Venezuelan low-income housing crisis?
Chavistas (and, more relevantly, most of the philochavistas who comment on my writing) start from the assumption that the only reason anyone opposes Chavez is class self-interest. This is undoubtedly true for some antichavistas. For many others, however, what's most irksome about Chavez is the magical strain in his government's thinking, its blanket rejection of any kind of independent advice, criticism, or debate. This dogmatism, this deep suspition about the motives of critics, locks the government into stances that not only cannot solve the problems at hand, but, even worse, close down the spaces for genuine debate about those problems.
The results is a politics of social inclusion that remains, largely, confined to the rhetorical realm - Chavez's discourse certainly makes his constituents feel included - while deepening the country's social problems. Point out that Chavez's housing policy will force 50,000 families to squat and build shanties next year and you're condemned as a counter-revolutionary element, an escualido fifth column that needs to be purged from the state. If you know the truth and you have a state job, you learn to keep quiet in order to protect yourself. Debate on a matter as seemingly apolitical as housing policy becomes deeply politicized, and those who criticize the government's policy are dismissed as wreckers or coup-plotters long before their criticisms have been seriously considered.
Put differently, in chavismo politics always takes precedence over policy. Uncomfortable facts are swept under the carpet and those who seek to bring attention to them are portrayed as traitors. So long as they're infused with reverence for the leader, pleasing fictions are always preferable to uncomfortable facts.
So long as criticism is seen as apostasy, so long as critics' voices are ignored as a matter of principle, so long as the worst of motives are automatically abscribed to all who dissent, the government will continue to make policy inside an ideological bubble where loyalty counts for far more than serious planning. Instead of hard-knuckled social policy development, instead of costed estimates and long-term projects, instead of serious plans aimed at grasping and then solving the underlying problem, we'll continue to get what we've been getting: ad hoc measures aimed at short-term political advantaged and divorced from any kind of serious analysis of what needs to be done in the long term.
Or, to say it in a single word, populism.
Where to the hell do you get $60 billion?
What Alemo's study makes clear, first of all, is that real solutions to the country's most pressing social problems will require public spending far in excess of the state's present capacity to pay. Venezuela's government is just too small and underfunded to make a serious stab at solving the housing crisis. And what's true of housing is true of any number of other social problems.
The solution, then, is clear: the public sector will need to grow very considerably to put itself in a position to face up to these expenditures. But after six years of rampant statism, heavy borrowing, and increased taxes, the chavista state has run up against the limits of its ability to extract resources from the economy. The housing crisis cannot be met by expanding the state's share of GDP - because the problem, precisely, is that GDP is too small at the moment to cover the country's basic necessities.
So, taken broadly enough, the lesson behind the Alemo proposal is that only rapid GDP growth, coupled with serious planning on how to use the extra resources that GDP growth makes available to the state, have any possibility of making real headway against the housing shortfall. On its current revenues, the state just cannot afford the expenditure needed, and given its current state, the economy cannot bankroll a state larger than the one we have now. Only a substantitally bigger economy can bankroll a substantially bigger state, and only a substantially bigger state can bankroll the investment needed to face up to the housing crisis.
This is an important point, because regime supporters tend to equate any mention of the need for rapid GDP growth with coded neoliberal speak for a policy of social abandonment. The truth, in fact, is quite the opposite: it's economic stagnation that has put the solution to the country's social problems beyond the reach of the state.
The problem, again, is that the cultural and ideological barriers that prevent chavismo from accepting an analysis like Alemo's also prevent it from accepting the kinds of policy reforms it would take to launch the economy into sustained rapid growth. The same lack of serious, techhnical planning, the same blanket mistrust of opponents, the same disdain for capitalist development, and the same belief in magical solutions have led to a brand of economic management that can produce, at best, ongoing stagnation.
Meanwhile, the revolution continues to build less than half of the homes it would need to build to stay even. Every ten minutes another Venezuelan family is forced to squat and build themselves a rancho just to find a place to live. Facing up to this situation is too difficult, too painful for chavistas. It requires too broad a reconsideration of el comandante's style of leadership. It's far easier, far more comforting, to propagandize about the revolution's great strides in house-building than to have an honest discussion about what's going wrong and how we might fix it.
For all its faults, the opposition is full of organizations like Alemo that are full of people eager to hold such serious debates - and not just on housing, on just about every topic of national relevance. The government, meanwhile, is forced by its ideology to run away from such debates - overstate its accomplishments, slur its opponents and obscure the nature of the challenges it faces. Personally, I can't for the life of me figure out what's "progressive" about this style of governance.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Alemo
The group's name is Alemo. It was founded in the early 1980s as a think-tank on Venezuela's urban housing crisis. Staffed by professional architects and urban planners - many are professors at the Universidad Central de Venezuela - the group had spent two decades in in-depth study of the urban planning challenge posed by Venezuela's mushrooming shantytowns, or barrios. With a bureaucrat's fastidiousness for detail, they had documented the scale of the problem, thought through the policy alternatives available to the state to respond to it, costed the various possibilities, and published the lot. In their estimation, the rock-bottom, lowest-imaginable price-tag for bringing all of Venezuela's urban dwellers to a basic standard of safety and comfort would come to...wait for it...$60 billion.
The price-tag is astronomical, ludicrous. It's over 60% of GDP, over twice the government's global yearly spending. Even if, as Alemo urges, the cost is spread over 10 years, a $6 billion/year price tag would require quadrupling the country's housing budget - well in excess of the state's ability to pay.
It's hardly a surprise, since Alemo's study points to a desastrous housing shortage and the need for a major project of infrastructure building to redress it. Just to give you a sense of how dire the housing crisis is, consider this: one-third of the country's housing stock consists of ranchos - shanties. However, fully half of all Venezuelans live in ranchos. Thousands of ranchos need to be bulldozed and replaced - they sit on geologically unstable ground, and could give way at the next rainstorm - while hundreds of thousands require investment to bring them up to minimal standards of safety and crowding. Moreover, hundreds of barrios need major investments to bring in basic urban amenities - from electricity and sanitation to schools, infermeries, playing fields and roads good enough for buses to use.
How did Alemo come to this $60 billion figure? The process was long and involved, but the innitial question was simple enough: what would it take to build a Venezuela where everyone who lives in a city has access to basic urban services, nobody lives at very high-risk areas for flooding or mudslides, nobody lives in extremely crowded or dangerously deteriorated housing, and the housing stock grows quickly enough to absorb the new families looking for places of their own as they hit their 20s?
To keep costs more or less reasonable, Alemo applied deep cost-cutting measures in their calculation, including a radical plan for the state to construct "proto-houses" (with all services, but minimal construction area) that residents would subsequently expand and complete, as well as financing mechanisms that would split costs between the state and beneficiary families. So the $6 billion/year tag is a rock-bottom figure, the very least the state could spend and still hope to meet its goals. Spend much less than that, and the problem deepens rather than receding.
"Normally," I remember them telling me, "you'd need to build at least 100,000 new low-income housing units a year - not to reduce current levels of crowding, but just to keep up with population growth - just to stay even. To start to make some headway against the trully appalling level of crowding in some barrios, you'd be talking about 120,000 houses a year, at least. Since the start of the Chavez era, we've never seen more than 60,000/year. So, in effect, we're going backwards: every house that you come up short from that 100,000 target means another family forced to choose between striking out on their own by squatting on an empty plot of land and building a rancho with their hands, or staying put and living in increasingly intolerable crowding with their relatives."
Serious Planning
Of course, this is just one area of concern: expert NGOs could (and have) come up with similar analyses for hospitals, schools, social security, the fire-fighters, the police, essentially any part of Venezuela's huge, overbloated but underfunded state. As a policy-wonk myself, it warms my heart to see the people of Alemo taking a long, hard, careful, uncompromising look at a policy problem like this and then propose specific, costed solutions. There is something reassuring about the mixture of genuine social concern and hard-headed planning in their work - their conviction that the more urgent a human problem is, the more down-to-earth and meticulous should be the planning for a solution. Alemo's proposals represent a hard-bitten marriage of idealism and pragmatism that eschews magical solutions and urges the state to tackle these matters with eyes wide open. It's a message, an attitude, that I can get 100% behind.
Now, how has the Chavez administration responded to Alemo's calls? The answer goes a long ways towards explaining my despair about the next two (or eight, or fourteen) years. First, the government purged Alemo members from Conavi, Fondur, Inavi, and every other state institute dealing with urban housing - putting the state's housing bureaucracy in the hands of doctrinaire chavistas that would neither produce independent estimates or raise troubling questions. Then, it set out to confuse the issue, making oversized claims for its decidedly undersized achievements.
At no point since 1999 has Venezuela come anywhere near to building the 100,000 low income housing units per year that it would take to keep up with population growth, let alone make headway into the housing crisis. Yet the government, conscious that very few people know this, continues to tout its house-building totals - just 25,000 units last year - as major revolutionary triumphs! Stop and think about what this means: last year alone, 75,000 poor Venezuelan families were forced to either build themselves an illegal shanty or stay on in impossibly cramped quarters...and the revolutionary people's government brags about this as a success!
(For next year, the government and the banks have reached an agreement where the government will pitch in $1.4 billion to build 50,000 low-income homes - watch for the headlines next year about the stunning, 100% growth in revolutionary housebuilding!)
What's the purpose of this detour into the minutiae of the Venezuelan low-income housing crisis?
Chavistas (and, more relevantly, most of the philochavistas who comment on my writing) start from the assumption that the only reason anyone opposes Chavez is class self-interest. This is undoubtedly true for some antichavistas. For many others, however, what's most irksome about Chavez is the magical strain in his government's thinking, its blanket rejection of any kind of independent advice, criticism, or debate. This dogmatism, this deep suspition about the motives of critics, locks the government into stances that not only cannot solve the problems at hand, but, even worse, close down the spaces for genuine debate about those problems.
The results is a politics of social inclusion that remains, largely, confined to the rhetorical realm - Chavez's discourse certainly makes his constituents feel included - while deepening the country's social problems. Point out that Chavez's housing policy will force 50,000 families to squat and build shanties next year and you're condemned as a counter-revolutionary element, an escualido fifth column that needs to be purged from the state. If you know the truth and you have a state job, you learn to keep quiet in order to protect yourself. Debate on a matter as seemingly apolitical as housing policy becomes deeply politicized, and those who criticize the government's policy are dismissed as wreckers or coup-plotters long before their criticisms have been seriously considered.
Put differently, in chavismo politics always takes precedence over policy. Uncomfortable facts are swept under the carpet and those who seek to bring attention to them are portrayed as traitors. So long as they're infused with reverence for the leader, pleasing fictions are always preferable to uncomfortable facts.
So long as criticism is seen as apostasy, so long as critics' voices are ignored as a matter of principle, so long as the worst of motives are automatically abscribed to all who dissent, the government will continue to make policy inside an ideological bubble where loyalty counts for far more than serious planning. Instead of hard-knuckled social policy development, instead of costed estimates and long-term projects, instead of serious plans aimed at grasping and then solving the underlying problem, we'll continue to get what we've been getting: ad hoc measures aimed at short-term political advantaged and divorced from any kind of serious analysis of what needs to be done in the long term.
Or, to say it in a single word, populism.
Where to the hell do you get $60 billion?
What Alemo's study makes clear, first of all, is that real solutions to the country's most pressing social problems will require public spending far in excess of the state's present capacity to pay. Venezuela's government is just too small and underfunded to make a serious stab at solving the housing crisis. And what's true of housing is true of any number of other social problems.
The solution, then, is clear: the public sector will need to grow very considerably to put itself in a position to face up to these expenditures. But after six years of rampant statism, heavy borrowing, and increased taxes, the chavista state has run up against the limits of its ability to extract resources from the economy. The housing crisis cannot be met by expanding the state's share of GDP - because the problem, precisely, is that GDP is too small at the moment to cover the country's basic necessities.
So, taken broadly enough, the lesson behind the Alemo proposal is that only rapid GDP growth, coupled with serious planning on how to use the extra resources that GDP growth makes available to the state, have any possibility of making real headway against the housing shortfall. On its current revenues, the state just cannot afford the expenditure needed, and given its current state, the economy cannot bankroll a state larger than the one we have now. Only a substantitally bigger economy can bankroll a substantially bigger state, and only a substantially bigger state can bankroll the investment needed to face up to the housing crisis.
This is an important point, because regime supporters tend to equate any mention of the need for rapid GDP growth with coded neoliberal speak for a policy of social abandonment. The truth, in fact, is quite the opposite: it's economic stagnation that has put the solution to the country's social problems beyond the reach of the state.
The problem, again, is that the cultural and ideological barriers that prevent chavismo from accepting an analysis like Alemo's also prevent it from accepting the kinds of policy reforms it would take to launch the economy into sustained rapid growth. The same lack of serious, techhnical planning, the same blanket mistrust of opponents, the same disdain for capitalist development, and the same belief in magical solutions have led to a brand of economic management that can produce, at best, ongoing stagnation.
Meanwhile, the revolution continues to build less than half of the homes it would need to build to stay even. Every ten minutes another Venezuelan family is forced to squat and build themselves a rancho just to find a place to live. Facing up to this situation is too difficult, too painful for chavistas. It requires too broad a reconsideration of el comandante's style of leadership. It's far easier, far more comforting, to propagandize about the revolution's great strides in house-building than to have an honest discussion about what's going wrong and how we might fix it.
For all its faults, the opposition is full of organizations like Alemo that are full of people eager to hold such serious debates - and not just on housing, on just about every topic of national relevance. The government, meanwhile, is forced by its ideology to run away from such debates - overstate its accomplishments, slur its opponents and obscure the nature of the challenges it faces. Personally, I can't for the life of me figure out what's "progressive" about this style of governance.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 3, 2004
Taking stock of the CD's collapse in international standing
I'm not about to tell the CD to give up its fraud claims until they're satisfied they know what happened on August 15th. But as they go forward with this line, they do so with eyes wide open...they need to understand the scale of the international public relations catastrophe they create by sticking by this line. This New Republic piece gives you a taste for the sort of coverage the opposition can expect if it sticks to its claim. Brutal stuff.
Denial
Caracas, Venezeula
Late Monday night, 19 hours after the results in this week's referendum on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez were reported, opposition leader Carlos Hermoso was furiously spinning a conspiracy theory. Despite results endorsed by international observers that showed Chávez winning by a landslide 16 percentage points, Hermoso said that "massive fraud" had been committed by both the election observers and the electronic voting machines used here for the first time. In a complicated yarn, Hermoso claimed that touch-screen voting machines in which people could vote "Yes" to oust Chávez or "No" to keep him were expertly "manipulated" by the government. Though there had also been a paper trail recording each voter's choice, Hermoso said the papers had been kidnapped and are now under military custody in a building called the "White Rabbit." But Hermoso warned that hard evidence of such fraud will be "very difficult" to find. As for the stamp of approval offered by election observers like Jimmy Carter, Hermoso argued that such observers were "compromised" by oil companies and the U.S. State Department, which wanted to keep Chávez in power.
Never mind that the populist Venezuelan commander-in-chief spent much of the recall campaign bashing the U.S., or that Washington openly welcomed a short-lived coup against Chávez earlier in his term. Like many others in the Democratic Coordinator (CD), the loose grouping of 27 political parties and 40 civil society organizations that united against Chávez, Hermoso suddenly found himself on the defensive following Chávez's big victory on Sunday, and simply refused to believe he had lost. The New York Times reported that on Monday two opposition leaders became so angry that "their faces turned white." Indeed, many other opposition leaders demanded a manual recount. "We want to know the truth," said Julio Borges, another top Coordinator official. "We will keep fighting until all our hair falls out." Some called for more anti-Chávez protests like the ones that have disrupted Venezuelan life for more than two years. Seven people were wounded in a small protest on Monday.
Indeed, it seems that the opposition leaders simply believed their own hype, while not realizing how ineffective the anti-Chávez movement had been. Riven by internal divisions, the CD waged a weak campaign that failed to take into account the president's enormous popularity in the poor barrios that make up the majority of Venezuela. The CD started on a bad note. In December 2003, the group mounted a devastating two month strike in which almost all Venezuelan business came to a halt and the state oil company nearly ceased operations. The strike ended in February 2004, but the economic damage was severe and the public, say some analysts, largely blamed the CD. "The strike was a failure," said Gregory Wilpert, head of a website called Venezuela Analysis.
Already behind, the CD never created a coherent political agenda to gain the 3.75 million votes it needed to oust Chávez. Its leader, Enrique Mendoza, was an uninspired speaker who brought little to the campaign. Then, the agenda the CD did release at the end of July largely copied Chávez's programs to end poverty and unemployment, without his searing--and popular--populist rhetoric. "The problem with the opposition is that they live in their own world," said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at Washington's Inter-American Dialogue, an organization focused on Latin America. "Having an anti-Chávez agenda wasn't enough." Indeed, on Election Day the opposition's internal exit polls showed it beating Chávez by 20 percentage points, though most mainstream polls, at the time, showed Chávez had a slight lead.
Meanwhile, Chávez, though known as a loose cannon, ran a strong and disciplined campaign. "We shouldn't be asking what the Coordinator lacked, but what Chávez had in abundance," said one opposition consultant who believes the Coordinator underestimated Chávez's charismatic leadership. "The truth is that the president is an excellent campaigner." Chávez's social programs, funded by oil money from the state-run oil monopoly--which has benefited from skyrocketing oil prices--were part of this campaign. Chávez invested up to $1.7 billion from Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, in building "missions" in poor barrios that offer free health care and teach people how to read. He also spent state money on primary education and new housing for the poor, all of which was advertised as being a direct result of Chávez policies. And after the oil strike, Chávez got the state oil company back up and running--partly by hiring Algerian experts to come in and train new Venezuelan workers--and kept the country's 3 million barrels of oil exports a day flowing. Venezuela is the world's number five oil exporter, and Chávez has vowed to expand oil production even further in the coming months.
In fact, the hard truth is that Venezuela is more stable today than it would have been if the opposition had won, at least in the short term. If the president was defeated or even if the vote had been close, mass chaos likely would have ensued with fanatics on both sides taking to the streets. A new election probably would have been held in 30 days, creating another opportunity for protest and even violence.
So despite Hermoso's cries of fraud, the long journey to remove Chávez through a recall is over. Opposition leaders should accept their loss if they are to have any chance of toppling him in the next presidential election in 2006. And they had better get cracking--Chávez's supporters are already talking about keeping him in office until 2021.
Rachel Van Dongen covers Latin America for The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and other publications.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Denial
Caracas, Venezeula
Late Monday night, 19 hours after the results in this week's referendum on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez were reported, opposition leader Carlos Hermoso was furiously spinning a conspiracy theory. Despite results endorsed by international observers that showed Chávez winning by a landslide 16 percentage points, Hermoso said that "massive fraud" had been committed by both the election observers and the electronic voting machines used here for the first time. In a complicated yarn, Hermoso claimed that touch-screen voting machines in which people could vote "Yes" to oust Chávez or "No" to keep him were expertly "manipulated" by the government. Though there had also been a paper trail recording each voter's choice, Hermoso said the papers had been kidnapped and are now under military custody in a building called the "White Rabbit." But Hermoso warned that hard evidence of such fraud will be "very difficult" to find. As for the stamp of approval offered by election observers like Jimmy Carter, Hermoso argued that such observers were "compromised" by oil companies and the U.S. State Department, which wanted to keep Chávez in power.
Never mind that the populist Venezuelan commander-in-chief spent much of the recall campaign bashing the U.S., or that Washington openly welcomed a short-lived coup against Chávez earlier in his term. Like many others in the Democratic Coordinator (CD), the loose grouping of 27 political parties and 40 civil society organizations that united against Chávez, Hermoso suddenly found himself on the defensive following Chávez's big victory on Sunday, and simply refused to believe he had lost. The New York Times reported that on Monday two opposition leaders became so angry that "their faces turned white." Indeed, many other opposition leaders demanded a manual recount. "We want to know the truth," said Julio Borges, another top Coordinator official. "We will keep fighting until all our hair falls out." Some called for more anti-Chávez protests like the ones that have disrupted Venezuelan life for more than two years. Seven people were wounded in a small protest on Monday.
Indeed, it seems that the opposition leaders simply believed their own hype, while not realizing how ineffective the anti-Chávez movement had been. Riven by internal divisions, the CD waged a weak campaign that failed to take into account the president's enormous popularity in the poor barrios that make up the majority of Venezuela. The CD started on a bad note. In December 2003, the group mounted a devastating two month strike in which almost all Venezuelan business came to a halt and the state oil company nearly ceased operations. The strike ended in February 2004, but the economic damage was severe and the public, say some analysts, largely blamed the CD. "The strike was a failure," said Gregory Wilpert, head of a website called Venezuela Analysis.
Already behind, the CD never created a coherent political agenda to gain the 3.75 million votes it needed to oust Chávez. Its leader, Enrique Mendoza, was an uninspired speaker who brought little to the campaign. Then, the agenda the CD did release at the end of July largely copied Chávez's programs to end poverty and unemployment, without his searing--and popular--populist rhetoric. "The problem with the opposition is that they live in their own world," said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at Washington's Inter-American Dialogue, an organization focused on Latin America. "Having an anti-Chávez agenda wasn't enough." Indeed, on Election Day the opposition's internal exit polls showed it beating Chávez by 20 percentage points, though most mainstream polls, at the time, showed Chávez had a slight lead.
Meanwhile, Chávez, though known as a loose cannon, ran a strong and disciplined campaign. "We shouldn't be asking what the Coordinator lacked, but what Chávez had in abundance," said one opposition consultant who believes the Coordinator underestimated Chávez's charismatic leadership. "The truth is that the president is an excellent campaigner." Chávez's social programs, funded by oil money from the state-run oil monopoly--which has benefited from skyrocketing oil prices--were part of this campaign. Chávez invested up to $1.7 billion from Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, in building "missions" in poor barrios that offer free health care and teach people how to read. He also spent state money on primary education and new housing for the poor, all of which was advertised as being a direct result of Chávez policies. And after the oil strike, Chávez got the state oil company back up and running--partly by hiring Algerian experts to come in and train new Venezuelan workers--and kept the country's 3 million barrels of oil exports a day flowing. Venezuela is the world's number five oil exporter, and Chávez has vowed to expand oil production even further in the coming months.
In fact, the hard truth is that Venezuela is more stable today than it would have been if the opposition had won, at least in the short term. If the president was defeated or even if the vote had been close, mass chaos likely would have ensued with fanatics on both sides taking to the streets. A new election probably would have been held in 30 days, creating another opportunity for protest and even violence.
So despite Hermoso's cries of fraud, the long journey to remove Chávez through a recall is over. Opposition leaders should accept their loss if they are to have any chance of toppling him in the next presidential election in 2006. And they had better get cracking--Chávez's supporters are already talking about keeping him in office until 2021.
Rachel Van Dongen covers Latin America for The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and other publications.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 2, 2004
The epistemology of fraud
Say you witness an electoral event...your side loses, you're mad, you think there was fraud. What does it take to demonstrate that there actually was fraud?
Well, it depends what side you're on. If you're a chavista, the president's word is enough. Back in November 2003, when the opposition gathered the signatures to demand an RR, president Chávez cried fraud before the signature collection process had even finished! On what basis, you might ask, did he make these allegations? It's a good question...he never told us.
I spent weeks on this blog asking a chavista, any chavista, to spell out for me clearly and specifically how it is that the alleged fraud was supposed to have happened. I wanted to understand what, exactly, they had in mind.
But I never got a satisfactory answer. By that I don't mean that I never got an answer I agreed with. I mean I never got an answer that made any sense, that made an actual, good faith attempt to describe coherently what the government thought had happened.
The closest we got was a farcical news conference where Chavez alleged that a guy named Emiliano Chavez Rosales had signed against him, despite being dead. The next day Emiliano Chavez Rosales came forward to disabuse the president of this notion.
Now, later events showed fairly clearly that the chavista claim of "megafraud" was a sham - but have you seen a single chavista question the president's leadership for the string of lies that was the megafraud claim? Within the cult of personality, Chavez is above reproach - even when everyone can see that he's lying.
Now, I don't find the opposition's fraud claims persuasive. But I can see that their claims are structured qualitatively different from Chavez's. The opposition has a battery of professionals, mathematicians and lawyers working on documenting its allegations right now. My inbox, for the last few weeks, has been peppered with emails that look like this,
where serious statisticians make a good faith effort to try to come up with an objective analysis of the numerical patterns in the CNE data. The search for answers is conducted, at least, with an eye to producing a demonstrable, coherent explanation that tries to make sense of all the facts and all the data. Miguel Octavio's blog reports the results of several such studies here, here and here.
Me? I'm open minded...maybe the opposition will eventually produce an argument, backed by a coherent analysis, that convinces me there was fraud. I doubt it, but who knows? One way or another, my conclusion will not based on unquestioning adherence to the opinions of any one leader: it'll be based on an a serious effort to try to understand what happened on the basis of the available evidence.
All of which chavistas ought to keep in mind before they berate the opposition for its skepticism and for making an effort to piece together the August 15th jigsaw puzzle. Me? I'll never attack people who ask questions simply for asking questions. And when I see chavistas doing so, I have to wonder...well, where exactly were they when President Chavez asserted a megafraud on the basis of no evidence, no plausible explanation of what he thought had happened, not even a a halfway decent conspiracy theory?
Cuz sure - up until this point the opposition's claims are just a conspiracy theory...but at least they are that! They're a hypothesis, an attempt to fit in every known part of the story into a narrative that makes some sense. From Chavez, we didn't even get that - we got an impossible assertion that we were expected to believe blindly, on faith alone.
Again, I don't actually believe the opposition can make its case. I'll be surprised if they do. If they don't, I think the CD leadership ought to resign - because making a false fraud allegation is really a despicable, irresponsible way to do politics. What I don't see, however, is chavistas taking the president to task for making wild fraud allegations that have a-already been disproven, and b-were made without even a cursory attempt to provide a coherent hypothesis about what had happened, much less credible evidence, to back them.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Well, it depends what side you're on. If you're a chavista, the president's word is enough. Back in November 2003, when the opposition gathered the signatures to demand an RR, president Chávez cried fraud before the signature collection process had even finished! On what basis, you might ask, did he make these allegations? It's a good question...he never told us.
I spent weeks on this blog asking a chavista, any chavista, to spell out for me clearly and specifically how it is that the alleged fraud was supposed to have happened. I wanted to understand what, exactly, they had in mind.
But I never got a satisfactory answer. By that I don't mean that I never got an answer I agreed with. I mean I never got an answer that made any sense, that made an actual, good faith attempt to describe coherently what the government thought had happened.
The closest we got was a farcical news conference where Chavez alleged that a guy named Emiliano Chavez Rosales had signed against him, despite being dead. The next day Emiliano Chavez Rosales came forward to disabuse the president of this notion.
Now, later events showed fairly clearly that the chavista claim of "megafraud" was a sham - but have you seen a single chavista question the president's leadership for the string of lies that was the megafraud claim? Within the cult of personality, Chavez is above reproach - even when everyone can see that he's lying.
Now, I don't find the opposition's fraud claims persuasive. But I can see that their claims are structured qualitatively different from Chavez's. The opposition has a battery of professionals, mathematicians and lawyers working on documenting its allegations right now. My inbox, for the last few weeks, has been peppered with emails that look like this,
where serious statisticians make a good faith effort to try to come up with an objective analysis of the numerical patterns in the CNE data. The search for answers is conducted, at least, with an eye to producing a demonstrable, coherent explanation that tries to make sense of all the facts and all the data. Miguel Octavio's blog reports the results of several such studies here, here and here.
Me? I'm open minded...maybe the opposition will eventually produce an argument, backed by a coherent analysis, that convinces me there was fraud. I doubt it, but who knows? One way or another, my conclusion will not based on unquestioning adherence to the opinions of any one leader: it'll be based on an a serious effort to try to understand what happened on the basis of the available evidence.
All of which chavistas ought to keep in mind before they berate the opposition for its skepticism and for making an effort to piece together the August 15th jigsaw puzzle. Me? I'll never attack people who ask questions simply for asking questions. And when I see chavistas doing so, I have to wonder...well, where exactly were they when President Chavez asserted a megafraud on the basis of no evidence, no plausible explanation of what he thought had happened, not even a a halfway decent conspiracy theory?
Cuz sure - up until this point the opposition's claims are just a conspiracy theory...but at least they are that! They're a hypothesis, an attempt to fit in every known part of the story into a narrative that makes some sense. From Chavez, we didn't even get that - we got an impossible assertion that we were expected to believe blindly, on faith alone.
Again, I don't actually believe the opposition can make its case. I'll be surprised if they do. If they don't, I think the CD leadership ought to resign - because making a false fraud allegation is really a despicable, irresponsible way to do politics. What I don't see, however, is chavistas taking the president to task for making wild fraud allegations that have a-already been disproven, and b-were made without even a cursory attempt to provide a coherent hypothesis about what had happened, much less credible evidence, to back them.
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September 1, 2004
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
Just to clarify my last few posts: am I sure there was no fraud on August 15th? No, of course not! How could I be?
I am sure that there is no evidence of fraud on August 15th. At best, the CD can string together a pretty compelling conspiracy theory. But without corroborating evidence, it must be seen as just that: a conspiracy theory.
However, to paraphrase the old aphorism, absence of evidence of fraud is not the same thing as evidence of an absence of fraud.
Lots of questions remain unanswered.
If the government and CNE really wanted to dispel all doubts, and if they have nothing to hide, they would just fling open all the ballot boxes. So far, they've refused to do that.
What can we conclude from that? Either they don't really want to dispel all doubts, or they have something to hide.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
I am sure that there is no evidence of fraud on August 15th. At best, the CD can string together a pretty compelling conspiracy theory. But without corroborating evidence, it must be seen as just that: a conspiracy theory.
However, to paraphrase the old aphorism, absence of evidence of fraud is not the same thing as evidence of an absence of fraud.
Lots of questions remain unanswered.
If the government and CNE really wanted to dispel all doubts, and if they have nothing to hide, they would just fling open all the ballot boxes. So far, they've refused to do that.
What can we conclude from that? Either they don't really want to dispel all doubts, or they have something to hide.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
August 31, 2004
Will somebody please give Enrique Mendoza a piano?
I. Where's our William Hague? Where are our pianos?
There's no particular reason for most Venezuelans to know who William Hague is. Briefly the leader of the UK Conservative Party, Hague was destroyed by Tony Blair in the 2002 British elections. The next day, he gave a speech to the party and nation congratulating the prime minister and promptly set off to learn the piano. Hague had never played a note in his life, but he'd understood that life after front-line politics would include much, much more free time, and he'd promised one of his constituents that, if he lost (as all opinion polls suggested) he'd dedicate himself to learning how to play. Reportedly, he's progressed to the point of learning the Moonlight Sonata.
The British have mechanisms - formal and informal - for renewing their political leaders once they've tried and failed. This is normal, as it should be. Nobody had to denounce Hague as a coupster fascist to persuade him to take up the piano. He understood that one gets one chance to lead a major British party to an election, and if yoiu fail, you resign. Simple.
Where are our William Hagues? Where are our pianos?
II. "Es que el fraude se nos fue de las manos..."
There is, to my mind, a strong whiff in the air right now of January 2003. You have to think back, to remember the panicked faces on CD leaders towards the end of that fateful month when they started to realize that the National Strike was a strategy without a plan, certain to fail. Stuck to positions too vociferously stated, the CD leaders realized only too late that they had blocked all their own exits. Extricating themselves from the giant mess they'd plunged the country and the movement into took the better part of a month. And why? Because not one of them was willing to stand up and say clearly what, nevertheless, the country could see: that they'd screwed up, put themselves into a political deadend, that they'd taken as divine truth positions that turned out to be just wrong. How many people had to lose their jobs just to protect their egos?
It was in January 2003 that that lovely phrase, in some sense true but obviously designed to pass the buck, was coined: es que el paro se nos fue de las manos - the paro ran away from us. Little by little, you can see the CD leaders sliding to the same kind of argument this time...es que el fraude se nos fue de las manos. Certainly it did...as it was predictable it would from the moment they decided to turn the "fraude" into an article of faith rather than a hypothesis to be either confirmed or denied on the basis of the availabe evidence. (And no, an accumulation of suspicions is not the same thing as evidence.)
III. The invisible movement
Perhaps the most telling part of the opposition's reaction to Chavez's victory is, precisely, the fact that so many don't seem to believe evidence is even necessary to demonstrate fraud. For a good many escualidos, Chavez must have lost, axiomatically. Articles like Ricardo Mitre's "Teodoro is Wrong" show clearly an opposition that takes the notion of a clean chavista win as a simple impossibility "after five years of wear and tear." Fraud is assumed but not stated - hardly in need of stating, since, after all, everyone knows that 60% of venezuelans hate Chavez.
Mitre, like so many of us, can't believe in the 6 million chavista votes because he never saw the movement that mobilized them. That's hardly surprising, since the opposition media never showed it to him, and he certainly assumes that everything on Channel 8 is a lie.
The Patrulleros de Florentino were more or less ignored in the opposition media, but the reality is that in the days before the referendum, the country's barrios were comprehensibly canvassed, organized and mobilized by a small army of highly motivated chavista volunteers. In other words, while the opposition wasn't looking, Chavismo did what it had been promising to do for years but had never quite managed to pull off: it became a genuine, organized mass movement.
Faced with the real possibility of seeing Chavez replaced in power by the opposition, millions of his supporters worked their hearts out for him. Some of my contacts in Caracas warned me of this in the days before the vote, "the opposition has no idea what's happening in the barrios. It's amazing! Normal people in the barrios are taking this fight and making it their own. Comando Maisanta is just as clueless as they've always been, but you should see it, it's the people, the patrulleros on the street that are doing it. They have maps, they have voter rolls, they're doing it all on their own. The opposition is going to lose and they're not going to know what hit them."
Mitre can't see that movement. It was hidden from him. He can't understand a world where more people vote for Chavez now than were voting for him four years ago. It seems non-sensical to him. But he can't see it because he inhabits just one of Venezuela's two realities and has lost any contact with, any insight into the other. So he takes it as a matter of dogma that chavismo cannot have grown since 2000. And nothing could be worse for the opposition's future prospects than accepting as dogma ideas that are just plain wrong.
IV: Opposition Big Bang Now!
Sooner or later we'll have to put our wide-ranging, amply justified outrage at Chavez to one side and question the shortcomings on our side that brought us to this sad juncture. It is not Chavez's fault that we've acquiesced to being led by an organization like the CD - slow, unimaginative, bureaucratically clumsy, riven by hidden power struggles, rudderless, unable to plan, unable to take responsibility for mistakes, unable to lead, fundamentally ineffective. It is not Chavez's fault that we've allowed a constellation of IVth Republic dinosaurs to appoint themselves "opposition leaders", and we've gone along with it. It's not Chavez's fault that nobody in the CD leadership can make a speech without sounding like an AD secretary general circa 1985. (They may not be AD party members today, but culturally, they're adecos.) It is not Chavez's fault that our leaders don't know how to talk to normal Venezuelans.
My feeling is that for once in the history of humanity, the government is actually giving us good advice right now - and stubborn bastards we are, we're refusing to take it precisely because it's the government issuing it. But MariPili is right: it's time for the rank-and-file members of the opposition to work up some anger at the way our leaders have behaved and demand that they go get better acquainted with their pianos. To stay wedded to the current CD leadership and the current CD organizational structure is to guarantee a long, painful string of failures into the future.
We deserve better leadership than we're getting, folks. And unless we demand it, there's no chance we'll get it.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
There's no particular reason for most Venezuelans to know who William Hague is. Briefly the leader of the UK Conservative Party, Hague was destroyed by Tony Blair in the 2002 British elections. The next day, he gave a speech to the party and nation congratulating the prime minister and promptly set off to learn the piano. Hague had never played a note in his life, but he'd understood that life after front-line politics would include much, much more free time, and he'd promised one of his constituents that, if he lost (as all opinion polls suggested) he'd dedicate himself to learning how to play. Reportedly, he's progressed to the point of learning the Moonlight Sonata.
The British have mechanisms - formal and informal - for renewing their political leaders once they've tried and failed. This is normal, as it should be. Nobody had to denounce Hague as a coupster fascist to persuade him to take up the piano. He understood that one gets one chance to lead a major British party to an election, and if yoiu fail, you resign. Simple.
Where are our William Hagues? Where are our pianos?
II. "Es que el fraude se nos fue de las manos..."
There is, to my mind, a strong whiff in the air right now of January 2003. You have to think back, to remember the panicked faces on CD leaders towards the end of that fateful month when they started to realize that the National Strike was a strategy without a plan, certain to fail. Stuck to positions too vociferously stated, the CD leaders realized only too late that they had blocked all their own exits. Extricating themselves from the giant mess they'd plunged the country and the movement into took the better part of a month. And why? Because not one of them was willing to stand up and say clearly what, nevertheless, the country could see: that they'd screwed up, put themselves into a political deadend, that they'd taken as divine truth positions that turned out to be just wrong. How many people had to lose their jobs just to protect their egos?
It was in January 2003 that that lovely phrase, in some sense true but obviously designed to pass the buck, was coined: es que el paro se nos fue de las manos - the paro ran away from us. Little by little, you can see the CD leaders sliding to the same kind of argument this time...es que el fraude se nos fue de las manos. Certainly it did...as it was predictable it would from the moment they decided to turn the "fraude" into an article of faith rather than a hypothesis to be either confirmed or denied on the basis of the availabe evidence. (And no, an accumulation of suspicions is not the same thing as evidence.)
III. The invisible movement
Perhaps the most telling part of the opposition's reaction to Chavez's victory is, precisely, the fact that so many don't seem to believe evidence is even necessary to demonstrate fraud. For a good many escualidos, Chavez must have lost, axiomatically. Articles like Ricardo Mitre's "Teodoro is Wrong" show clearly an opposition that takes the notion of a clean chavista win as a simple impossibility "after five years of wear and tear." Fraud is assumed but not stated - hardly in need of stating, since, after all, everyone knows that 60% of venezuelans hate Chavez.
Mitre, like so many of us, can't believe in the 6 million chavista votes because he never saw the movement that mobilized them. That's hardly surprising, since the opposition media never showed it to him, and he certainly assumes that everything on Channel 8 is a lie.
The Patrulleros de Florentino were more or less ignored in the opposition media, but the reality is that in the days before the referendum, the country's barrios were comprehensibly canvassed, organized and mobilized by a small army of highly motivated chavista volunteers. In other words, while the opposition wasn't looking, Chavismo did what it had been promising to do for years but had never quite managed to pull off: it became a genuine, organized mass movement.
Faced with the real possibility of seeing Chavez replaced in power by the opposition, millions of his supporters worked their hearts out for him. Some of my contacts in Caracas warned me of this in the days before the vote, "the opposition has no idea what's happening in the barrios. It's amazing! Normal people in the barrios are taking this fight and making it their own. Comando Maisanta is just as clueless as they've always been, but you should see it, it's the people, the patrulleros on the street that are doing it. They have maps, they have voter rolls, they're doing it all on their own. The opposition is going to lose and they're not going to know what hit them."
Mitre can't see that movement. It was hidden from him. He can't understand a world where more people vote for Chavez now than were voting for him four years ago. It seems non-sensical to him. But he can't see it because he inhabits just one of Venezuela's two realities and has lost any contact with, any insight into the other. So he takes it as a matter of dogma that chavismo cannot have grown since 2000. And nothing could be worse for the opposition's future prospects than accepting as dogma ideas that are just plain wrong.
IV: Opposition Big Bang Now!
Sooner or later we'll have to put our wide-ranging, amply justified outrage at Chavez to one side and question the shortcomings on our side that brought us to this sad juncture. It is not Chavez's fault that we've acquiesced to being led by an organization like the CD - slow, unimaginative, bureaucratically clumsy, riven by hidden power struggles, rudderless, unable to plan, unable to take responsibility for mistakes, unable to lead, fundamentally ineffective. It is not Chavez's fault that we've allowed a constellation of IVth Republic dinosaurs to appoint themselves "opposition leaders", and we've gone along with it. It's not Chavez's fault that nobody in the CD leadership can make a speech without sounding like an AD secretary general circa 1985. (They may not be AD party members today, but culturally, they're adecos.) It is not Chavez's fault that our leaders don't know how to talk to normal Venezuelans.
My feeling is that for once in the history of humanity, the government is actually giving us good advice right now - and stubborn bastards we are, we're refusing to take it precisely because it's the government issuing it. But MariPili is right: it's time for the rank-and-file members of the opposition to work up some anger at the way our leaders have behaved and demand that they go get better acquainted with their pianos. To stay wedded to the current CD leadership and the current CD organizational structure is to guarantee a long, painful string of failures into the future.
We deserve better leadership than we're getting, folks. And unless we demand it, there's no chance we'll get it.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
August 30, 2004
Reflections of a suspicious comeflor
by Gustavo Soto-Rosa
I want to warn you, first off, that I'm a die hard comeflor, but at the same time I am very distrustful.
What if the Coordinadora, seeing itself on the losing end, invented the story of the fraud to hang on to the 41%, plus those "they stole from us"?
If the exit polls were showing the Si winning four hours before the end of voting and they knew the government was preparing to say No had won, why didn't they publish a statement calling on people to be alert and not to let the ballot boxes out of sight even for a minute in the centers chosen for an on-the-spot audit? Why didn't they give the news media a list of these polling centers? There were opposition representatives in just 27 of the 192 centers selected for the audit. Why didn't they demand the presence of international observers right then, not in Caracas but on the spot at each audit center? Was there a directive issued to stand back from the audit process, from the counting and the tallying and from the after-the-fact audit in order to create doubt? Remember that the first to cry fraud was (Accion Democratica Secretary General) Ramos Allup, and I hope he'll forgive me, but he's one of the CD leaders that inspires least confidence. In fact, I believe he didn't use the word fraud.
Which, of course, take us to the exit polls. They're the very definition of inauditable and can easily be manipulated in tallying. This would show up Plaza and Machado as liars, which is hard to believe, unless they temselves were fooled. [Quico's note - they could also be hopelessly incompetent.] It would also make fools of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, the company that designed the exit poll. They have publicly backed the results of their poll. They're a recognized firm with lots to lose if its methodology is questioned, or worse yet, its ethics.
I of course don't doubt for a minute that the government would be willing and able to carry out a fraud. In fact, the fraud is out in the open in the form of the scandalous use of public resources for the No campaign; an unscrupulous use of the goods and power of the state to plow over dissenters and hoard yet more power.
I also think it's very possible that there could have been a switch at the moment when each voting machine connected at to the central database so it would register not the real vote, but pre-programmed, tampered with votes. Call it "matrix" voting, because at the same time it would have to print up the ballots for the fraud to be switched with the pre-existing boxes at the right moment.
Of course, here the plot thickens because we've already seen how long it took Sumate to organize 3.5 million signatures. In this case you'd have to dilute two million voting papers among many others (9.5 million) to make the switch go by unseen. That means they'd have to have had a battery of printers working day and night with people to organize all the boxes, close them with fake signatures to then transport them and switch them with the original.
This is where the fraud theory falls under its own weight.. To be able to pull off a stunt of this caliber, the government would've needed a small army of people to set it all up. A few hackers could have manipulated the system and you could keep that secret, but you can't do that with a mass of people working to switch millions of ballots. How many people did Sumate need to organize the signatures? Multiply it by three. How much time did Sumate, an efficient organization, take? These people were supposedly ready for an audit in two days and according to Smartmatic, they're ready for a total audit. Something is not right with this theory. The government has given many signs of extreme clumsiness when efficiency counts most. Remember how hard a time they had getting signatures against the diputados.
Obviously, somebody is lying here. The truly tragic thing wouldn't be if our adversary lied to us, from Chavez we expect that and much more, but if the betrayal came from our own leaders.
And may God forgive me for going around mistrusting people, like my old lady says.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
I want to warn you, first off, that I'm a die hard comeflor, but at the same time I am very distrustful.
What if the Coordinadora, seeing itself on the losing end, invented the story of the fraud to hang on to the 41%, plus those "they stole from us"?
If the exit polls were showing the Si winning four hours before the end of voting and they knew the government was preparing to say No had won, why didn't they publish a statement calling on people to be alert and not to let the ballot boxes out of sight even for a minute in the centers chosen for an on-the-spot audit? Why didn't they give the news media a list of these polling centers? There were opposition representatives in just 27 of the 192 centers selected for the audit. Why didn't they demand the presence of international observers right then, not in Caracas but on the spot at each audit center? Was there a directive issued to stand back from the audit process, from the counting and the tallying and from the after-the-fact audit in order to create doubt? Remember that the first to cry fraud was (Accion Democratica Secretary General) Ramos Allup, and I hope he'll forgive me, but he's one of the CD leaders that inspires least confidence. In fact, I believe he didn't use the word fraud.
Which, of course, take us to the exit polls. They're the very definition of inauditable and can easily be manipulated in tallying. This would show up Plaza and Machado as liars, which is hard to believe, unless they temselves were fooled. [Quico's note - they could also be hopelessly incompetent.] It would also make fools of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, the company that designed the exit poll. They have publicly backed the results of their poll. They're a recognized firm with lots to lose if its methodology is questioned, or worse yet, its ethics.
I of course don't doubt for a minute that the government would be willing and able to carry out a fraud. In fact, the fraud is out in the open in the form of the scandalous use of public resources for the No campaign; an unscrupulous use of the goods and power of the state to plow over dissenters and hoard yet more power.
I also think it's very possible that there could have been a switch at the moment when each voting machine connected at to the central database so it would register not the real vote, but pre-programmed, tampered with votes. Call it "matrix" voting, because at the same time it would have to print up the ballots for the fraud to be switched with the pre-existing boxes at the right moment.
Of course, here the plot thickens because we've already seen how long it took Sumate to organize 3.5 million signatures. In this case you'd have to dilute two million voting papers among many others (9.5 million) to make the switch go by unseen. That means they'd have to have had a battery of printers working day and night with people to organize all the boxes, close them with fake signatures to then transport them and switch them with the original.
This is where the fraud theory falls under its own weight.. To be able to pull off a stunt of this caliber, the government would've needed a small army of people to set it all up. A few hackers could have manipulated the system and you could keep that secret, but you can't do that with a mass of people working to switch millions of ballots. How many people did Sumate need to organize the signatures? Multiply it by three. How much time did Sumate, an efficient organization, take? These people were supposedly ready for an audit in two days and according to Smartmatic, they're ready for a total audit. Something is not right with this theory. The government has given many signs of extreme clumsiness when efficiency counts most. Remember how hard a time they had getting signatures against the diputados.
Obviously, somebody is lying here. The truly tragic thing wouldn't be if our adversary lied to us, from Chavez we expect that and much more, but if the betrayal came from our own leaders.
And may God forgive me for going around mistrusting people, like my old lady says.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
The political dynamics of crying fraud
Whether or not there was fraud is one question. The political dynamics of the Fraud-claim are something else altogether.
Who gains from the fraud claim?
1-The Current CD Leadership: Claiming fraud shields the CD leadership from an uncomfortable debate about what they did wrong, how they managed to lose the election, and what they should do differently in the future. So long as they cling on to their "reasonable doubt", CD leaders don't have to walk the plank, and they know it. Probably, an all-out finger-pointing Battle Royale would break out if the CD accepted results as legitimate. Fractures would turn up immediately, the CD could collapse altogether. (This, in my opinion, would be a good thing, not a bad thing.)
2-Chavez: At the same time, the fraud claim serves Chavez well, by painting the CD as the same old tired extremist fringe of April 12th 2002 and Dec-Jan 2002-2003. An opposition wedded to fraud claims will tend to exclude itself from the political process, marginalize itself internationally and alienate the uncommited swing-voters Venezuelans call Ni-Nis. Such a movement cannot and will not carry out the painful process of introspection it would take to correct the mistakes it's made in the last two years. Politically, then, the fraud claims are a God-send to the government.
[In my more conspiratorial moments, I tend to think the CNE understands that fraud-claims benefit Chavez, and has refused to take the steps it would take to convince the opposition that the election was clean (the hot-audit, a wide-ranging cold-audit of ballot papers, a machine audit) as a way of keeping the opposition's "reasonable doubt" alive.]
Meanwhile, who loses?
1-Rank-and-file opposition members: Not only did we lose the election, now we're also losing the opportunity to use that loss as a platform to renew our political movement. The referendum leaves us stuck not just with Chavez, but also with the opposition leadership that managed to lose the referendum against him.
2-Rank-and-file chavistas: Who, like anyone who lives in democracy, stand to benefit from having a serious, vigorous, forward looking opposition to the government rather than the dawning Chavista one-party system.
In other words, quite aside from whether there was or wasn't fraud, official results will not change. Given that they will not change, we have to ask ourselves: what is the sense of continuing these claims? Who do they benefit? When will the opposition's rank-and-file work up some anger at the CD and demand more serious leadership?
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Who gains from the fraud claim?
1-The Current CD Leadership: Claiming fraud shields the CD leadership from an uncomfortable debate about what they did wrong, how they managed to lose the election, and what they should do differently in the future. So long as they cling on to their "reasonable doubt", CD leaders don't have to walk the plank, and they know it. Probably, an all-out finger-pointing Battle Royale would break out if the CD accepted results as legitimate. Fractures would turn up immediately, the CD could collapse altogether. (This, in my opinion, would be a good thing, not a bad thing.)
2-Chavez: At the same time, the fraud claim serves Chavez well, by painting the CD as the same old tired extremist fringe of April 12th 2002 and Dec-Jan 2002-2003. An opposition wedded to fraud claims will tend to exclude itself from the political process, marginalize itself internationally and alienate the uncommited swing-voters Venezuelans call Ni-Nis. Such a movement cannot and will not carry out the painful process of introspection it would take to correct the mistakes it's made in the last two years. Politically, then, the fraud claims are a God-send to the government.
[In my more conspiratorial moments, I tend to think the CNE understands that fraud-claims benefit Chavez, and has refused to take the steps it would take to convince the opposition that the election was clean (the hot-audit, a wide-ranging cold-audit of ballot papers, a machine audit) as a way of keeping the opposition's "reasonable doubt" alive.]
Meanwhile, who loses?
1-Rank-and-file opposition members: Not only did we lose the election, now we're also losing the opportunity to use that loss as a platform to renew our political movement. The referendum leaves us stuck not just with Chavez, but also with the opposition leadership that managed to lose the referendum against him.
2-Rank-and-file chavistas: Who, like anyone who lives in democracy, stand to benefit from having a serious, vigorous, forward looking opposition to the government rather than the dawning Chavista one-party system.
In other words, quite aside from whether there was or wasn't fraud, official results will not change. Given that they will not change, we have to ask ourselves: what is the sense of continuing these claims? Who do they benefit? When will the opposition's rank-and-file work up some anger at the CD and demand more serious leadership?
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Return to Interactivity
One week ago, I pulled the plug on the simple "comments" feature due to the turn the discussions had taken...straight into the gutter. This week, thanks to the initiative of several readers, Caracas Chronicles returns to interactivity on a far fancier, moderated forum platform: Nueva-Venezuela.org.
The new software is far more powerful and flexible than the old haloscan comments forum. Nueva-Venezuela has sections for debates in both English and Spanish. It requires you to register before posting, and it will make it much easier to nip abusive posting in the bud.
In the interest of the separation of powers, I will not moderate the discussion myself: longtime posters Pepe Mora and Gustavo Soto-Rosa will keep the peace. Pepe and Gustavo will work hard to keep the debate constructive and civilized: with any luck, the result will be vigorous discussion free from sterile ideological diatribes, personal attacks or party-line rants. Put another way, Pepe and Gustavo will have plenipotentiary authority to boot your ass out of the forum if you succomb to posting sterile ideological diatribes, personal attacks or party-line rants.
Scared yet? If you're not, click here to join the new moderated forum at Nueva-Venezuela.org.
The new software is far more powerful and flexible than the old haloscan comments forum. Nueva-Venezuela has sections for debates in both English and Spanish. It requires you to register before posting, and it will make it much easier to nip abusive posting in the bud.
In the interest of the separation of powers, I will not moderate the discussion myself: longtime posters Pepe Mora and Gustavo Soto-Rosa will keep the peace. Pepe and Gustavo will work hard to keep the debate constructive and civilized: with any luck, the result will be vigorous discussion free from sterile ideological diatribes, personal attacks or party-line rants. Put another way, Pepe and Gustavo will have plenipotentiary authority to boot your ass out of the forum if you succomb to posting sterile ideological diatribes, personal attacks or party-line rants.
Scared yet? If you're not, click here to join the new moderated forum at Nueva-Venezuela.org.
August 29, 2004
Something very strange happened in Venezuela
Readers of this blog know I've had a very hard time trying to piece together what happened during and after the August 15th referendum. Like everyone in the opposition, I've gone through a lot of confusing, contradictory information on whether or not claims of fraud make any sense.
It's a disorienting exercise. Both sides have seemingly incontrovertible arguments, and each has to resort to fantastic allegations to refute the other. CNE has the backing of international observers not only for its official results, but also for a very-tricky to get-around consequent audit. CANTV has ratified that its machine operators and data transmission system worked as advertised. No concrete evidence of fraud has been brought forward. The opposition can only disown the results by explaining away a this evidence on the basis of a massive, perfect conspiracy, a conspiracy with no visible leaks.
But the opposition also has evidence in hand that cannot be contradicted without supposing an set of equal but opposite conspiracies. Everyone knows there's no way that a professionally run exit poll using established methodology and repeated by several different organization comes out with a result 40 points off from the official result. This happened in Venezuela systematically. There are state level pollsters in Venezuela that have been carrying out exit polls using the same methodology in election after election and never gotten an exit poll result more than 1% off from the announced result. This time, using the same methodology and polling intensively - as always - in poor areas, they come up with results miles away from those announced.
No "nice" hypothesis can explain the gap: it's not a matter of bias in the areas polled, because exit poll results from given voting centers vary widely from the results reported from that center. Nor can the gap be assigned to the choice of political activists as polling staff: polls run by Sumate volunteers came up with similar results as polls carried out by firms that hire college students as interviewers.
The only possible explanation for the disparity is that there's a wide-ranging conspiracy, a kind of fraud-crying cartel of any number of different organizations to diffuse false exit poll results. This sort of story is easy for chavistas to believe, after hearing years of oversimplifications and lies about the opposition. But if it is a conspiracy, it's a perfect conspiracy - one where no one leaks, no one squeals, no one made a single mistake.
Whether or not you believe there was fraud, you're required to believe a series of wildly improbable evils against your political opponents for the events of the last two weeks to make sense. Rather than providing a solution to deepening polarization, the dispute over the referendum became yet another phase in this process of increasing polarization of the country into competing camps that believe the very worst about one another.
Because, in the end, Venezuelans will believe the conspiracy theory that favors their side of the political divide and that's the end of it. And this is what's so worrying about this odd-ball situation the country's living. Each half of the country is forced to believe a conspiracy theory that paints the other half in the worst possible light. Each takes refuge in its own truth, and building an understanding, let alone trust, across the divide becomes impossible.
Which is too bad, because Venezuela was badly in need of a peaceful, democratic, electoral and constitutional solution to the governability crisis, and it didn't get it.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
It's a disorienting exercise. Both sides have seemingly incontrovertible arguments, and each has to resort to fantastic allegations to refute the other. CNE has the backing of international observers not only for its official results, but also for a very-tricky to get-around consequent audit. CANTV has ratified that its machine operators and data transmission system worked as advertised. No concrete evidence of fraud has been brought forward. The opposition can only disown the results by explaining away a this evidence on the basis of a massive, perfect conspiracy, a conspiracy with no visible leaks.
But the opposition also has evidence in hand that cannot be contradicted without supposing an set of equal but opposite conspiracies. Everyone knows there's no way that a professionally run exit poll using established methodology and repeated by several different organization comes out with a result 40 points off from the official result. This happened in Venezuela systematically. There are state level pollsters in Venezuela that have been carrying out exit polls using the same methodology in election after election and never gotten an exit poll result more than 1% off from the announced result. This time, using the same methodology and polling intensively - as always - in poor areas, they come up with results miles away from those announced.
No "nice" hypothesis can explain the gap: it's not a matter of bias in the areas polled, because exit poll results from given voting centers vary widely from the results reported from that center. Nor can the gap be assigned to the choice of political activists as polling staff: polls run by Sumate volunteers came up with similar results as polls carried out by firms that hire college students as interviewers.
The only possible explanation for the disparity is that there's a wide-ranging conspiracy, a kind of fraud-crying cartel of any number of different organizations to diffuse false exit poll results. This sort of story is easy for chavistas to believe, after hearing years of oversimplifications and lies about the opposition. But if it is a conspiracy, it's a perfect conspiracy - one where no one leaks, no one squeals, no one made a single mistake.
Whether or not you believe there was fraud, you're required to believe a series of wildly improbable evils against your political opponents for the events of the last two weeks to make sense. Rather than providing a solution to deepening polarization, the dispute over the referendum became yet another phase in this process of increasing polarization of the country into competing camps that believe the very worst about one another.
Because, in the end, Venezuelans will believe the conspiracy theory that favors their side of the political divide and that's the end of it. And this is what's so worrying about this odd-ball situation the country's living. Each half of the country is forced to believe a conspiracy theory that paints the other half in the worst possible light. Each takes refuge in its own truth, and building an understanding, let alone trust, across the divide becomes impossible.
Which is too bad, because Venezuela was badly in need of a peaceful, democratic, electoral and constitutional solution to the governability crisis, and it didn't get it.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
August 27, 2004
Who in the opposition has the moral authority to accept a Chavez victory?
Teodoro Petkoff does.
This is the Aug. 25th editorial in TalCual
Sumate's statement, published yesterday, gives rise to an urgent reflection. In effect, if "it is not possible to speak of fraud without strong evidence," a question of utmost importance arises:
What if there was no fraud? What if the results of the referendum reflect the will of the voters? Today, CANTV reaffirms, on the basis of technical arguments, what the Coordinadora Democratica had said before the referendum about the adequacy of the automated voting system. We recommend reading CANTV's statement because it leads to another question: isn't it possible that the vote remains a trustworthy democratic instrument and that refusing to use it could leave that huge mass of at least 40% of the voters without any kind of alternative vis-a-vis those in power?
Clearing up this matter quickly is crucial for the immediate future, but also for the long term. We have to get past our shock, depression and anger to examine more clearly and lucidly what happened. Because, if Sumate is now cautiously saying that "the numerical patterns found in the actas do not constitute conclusive proof of fraud" (El Nacional, Aug. 23rd, page A3); if CANTV vouches for the total effectiveness with which it carried out its responsibilities on the referendum (which, incidentally, were not limited to data transmission but also included coordinating the work of over 11,000 voting machine operators); if the results of the manual voting tables, which constitute a gigantic sample of one million of the country's poorest voters confirms the general tendency registered in the poorest areas; if OAS and the Carter Center, whose guarantees were previously said to be sufficient to accept the results, did not "rush to judgment" but instead correctly judged reality; if the exit polls, which are now thrown around as though they were Moses's Tablets, were not trustworthy enough, as expressed by one of the main pollsters in Venezuela (whose own exit polls, incidentally, had detected the trend in favor of the No from early on); if, all things considered, it does not appear to be a coincidence that all the pre-vote polls (except UCV's) had the No ahead, isn't it about time, then, to leave behind the listlessness produced by the results and to start to admit that the evidence indicates that Chavez won the referendum, but that the referendum also showed the existence of a powerful force of opposition voters, which won in Caracas and the biggest cities in the countries, that even in the chavista strongholds of the shantytowns has between 30% and 40% of the electorate, and that it would therefore be extremely irrational and irresponsible for people to give in to hopelessness and to fail to participate in the state and local elections next month?
Refusing to capitulate goes beyond mere rhetoric.
It means giving up the consoling conspiracy theories about Bush and "that old wanker" Carter, supposedly in favor of the oil interests of the empire, with the complicity of - wait for it - the Colombian oligarchy as represented by "that fucking Colombian" Gaviria; it means discarding the "pregnant bird" stories about the "Russian superprogrammer" who supposedly tampered with the machines and other such nonsense, and recognizing rather that something must have happened in these last few years in this country to allow the victory of a rhetoric of social redemption in the mouth of a strong leader who knows how to communicate it, and who despite heading one of the worse governments in recent memory, manages to hang on to the affection and the backing of millions of our fellow citizens who do not "sell" their votes but rather identify themselves still - though less and less so - with that hawker of illusions and hopes called Hugo Chavez.
For those who refuse to capitulate, digesting all of this and metabolizing it is indispensable: we need to lick our wounds, jump back into the ring, and fight.
This is the Aug. 25th editorial in TalCual
Sumate's statement, published yesterday, gives rise to an urgent reflection. In effect, if "it is not possible to speak of fraud without strong evidence," a question of utmost importance arises:
What if there was no fraud? What if the results of the referendum reflect the will of the voters? Today, CANTV reaffirms, on the basis of technical arguments, what the Coordinadora Democratica had said before the referendum about the adequacy of the automated voting system. We recommend reading CANTV's statement because it leads to another question: isn't it possible that the vote remains a trustworthy democratic instrument and that refusing to use it could leave that huge mass of at least 40% of the voters without any kind of alternative vis-a-vis those in power?
Clearing up this matter quickly is crucial for the immediate future, but also for the long term. We have to get past our shock, depression and anger to examine more clearly and lucidly what happened. Because, if Sumate is now cautiously saying that "the numerical patterns found in the actas do not constitute conclusive proof of fraud" (El Nacional, Aug. 23rd, page A3); if CANTV vouches for the total effectiveness with which it carried out its responsibilities on the referendum (which, incidentally, were not limited to data transmission but also included coordinating the work of over 11,000 voting machine operators); if the results of the manual voting tables, which constitute a gigantic sample of one million of the country's poorest voters confirms the general tendency registered in the poorest areas; if OAS and the Carter Center, whose guarantees were previously said to be sufficient to accept the results, did not "rush to judgment" but instead correctly judged reality; if the exit polls, which are now thrown around as though they were Moses's Tablets, were not trustworthy enough, as expressed by one of the main pollsters in Venezuela (whose own exit polls, incidentally, had detected the trend in favor of the No from early on); if, all things considered, it does not appear to be a coincidence that all the pre-vote polls (except UCV's) had the No ahead, isn't it about time, then, to leave behind the listlessness produced by the results and to start to admit that the evidence indicates that Chavez won the referendum, but that the referendum also showed the existence of a powerful force of opposition voters, which won in Caracas and the biggest cities in the countries, that even in the chavista strongholds of the shantytowns has between 30% and 40% of the electorate, and that it would therefore be extremely irrational and irresponsible for people to give in to hopelessness and to fail to participate in the state and local elections next month?
Refusing to capitulate goes beyond mere rhetoric.
It means giving up the consoling conspiracy theories about Bush and "that old wanker" Carter, supposedly in favor of the oil interests of the empire, with the complicity of - wait for it - the Colombian oligarchy as represented by "that fucking Colombian" Gaviria; it means discarding the "pregnant bird" stories about the "Russian superprogrammer" who supposedly tampered with the machines and other such nonsense, and recognizing rather that something must have happened in these last few years in this country to allow the victory of a rhetoric of social redemption in the mouth of a strong leader who knows how to communicate it, and who despite heading one of the worse governments in recent memory, manages to hang on to the affection and the backing of millions of our fellow citizens who do not "sell" their votes but rather identify themselves still - though less and less so - with that hawker of illusions and hopes called Hugo Chavez.
For those who refuse to capitulate, digesting all of this and metabolizing it is indispensable: we need to lick our wounds, jump back into the ring, and fight.
August 26, 2004
Turning Japanese
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
I show this sentence to Kanako, my Japanese friend. She looks at it for a second, thinks about it, and in her broken Italian says, "No, it's not right."
"Hmm?"
"Maybe it's right in Europe, but somebody Japanese would never believe it. It's a very European idea."
"How do you mean?"
"I think because Europeans are monotheist, you know, there is only one God, and therefore there is only one truth. But in Japan, we don't think this way. We have so many Gods, so many spirits. And a spirit is a source of truth. So for us, it is normal to think that there are many truths, that one spirit doesn't get to impose its truth on another. So yes, Sherlock Holmes is right...in Europe. We, we would never accept it."
"But you see, Kanako, that won't do, because either most Venezuelans voted yes or most Venezuelans voted no. It can't be both."
"Of course," she says, "but you don't understand. Yes, there is one truth on that level. But it doesn't matter. Because the truth is something we make, collectively, by believing in it. Today, maybe so many people in Venezuela believe that Yes won, and for them, that is the truth. Others believe that No won, and for them, that is the truth. They make it the truth by believing in it."
"But a country can't work this way, with half the country sure the other country is wrong."
She smiles and shrugs, "maybe a christian country can't work that way. I don't know what to say. It's a very western idea. For me, having a lot of different truths, well, it's normal, it's the most normal thing there is."
I try to make sense of Kanako's words, and I struggle. But I see that, in some sense, she's just right. There was fraud. And there was no fraud. And half the country will never believe that there was no fraud. And half the country will never believe there was fraud. We're not Japanese. We can't think of that as normal. But maybe, who knows, maybe the Japanese are right. Maybe it is normal. Maybe it's the most normal thing in the world.
I show this sentence to Kanako, my Japanese friend. She looks at it for a second, thinks about it, and in her broken Italian says, "No, it's not right."
"Hmm?"
"Maybe it's right in Europe, but somebody Japanese would never believe it. It's a very European idea."
"How do you mean?"
"I think because Europeans are monotheist, you know, there is only one God, and therefore there is only one truth. But in Japan, we don't think this way. We have so many Gods, so many spirits. And a spirit is a source of truth. So for us, it is normal to think that there are many truths, that one spirit doesn't get to impose its truth on another. So yes, Sherlock Holmes is right...in Europe. We, we would never accept it."
"But you see, Kanako, that won't do, because either most Venezuelans voted yes or most Venezuelans voted no. It can't be both."
"Of course," she says, "but you don't understand. Yes, there is one truth on that level. But it doesn't matter. Because the truth is something we make, collectively, by believing in it. Today, maybe so many people in Venezuela believe that Yes won, and for them, that is the truth. Others believe that No won, and for them, that is the truth. They make it the truth by believing in it."
"But a country can't work this way, with half the country sure the other country is wrong."
She smiles and shrugs, "maybe a christian country can't work that way. I don't know what to say. It's a very western idea. For me, having a lot of different truths, well, it's normal, it's the most normal thing there is."
I try to make sense of Kanako's words, and I struggle. But I see that, in some sense, she's just right. There was fraud. And there was no fraud. And half the country will never believe that there was no fraud. And half the country will never believe there was fraud. We're not Japanese. We can't think of that as normal. But maybe, who knows, maybe the Japanese are right. Maybe it is normal. Maybe it's the most normal thing in the world.
August 25, 2004
Why is this blog so quiet...
Because, to cite Sumate's Aug. 23rd statement...
Sumate has received hundreds of reports of fraud from citizens, civil associations and other organizations [...] Some of these reports have already been investigated and discarted, while others have given rise to more in-depth investigations that will allow, in due time, to demonstrate or rule out the reports of irregularities and to finally uncover the truth.
One of the reports is referred to a series of "patterns" identified in the tallying reports (actas). Sumate is consulting experts and academics in Venezuela and abroad who are carrying out a detailed and exhaustive analysis of these cases. So far, they do not constitute a convincing proof of fraud.
However, we must warn the people of Venezuela that these investigations will take some time.
[...]
A legitimate reconciliation between Venezuelans can only come once all doubts about what happened during the referendum have been cleared up.
We deserve to know the truth. If the result is that the winning option was NO, then NO voters must not feel shame to proclaim it and must not remain under the shadow of suspicion of fraud. If the winning result is the SI, it shall be necessary to proceed to the necessary correction to recognize the will of the Venezuelan people.
Deep down, I'm now 99% convinced that there was no fraud and the government won cleanly. However, I can't make a final judgement until I read and consider Sumate's final report. Until then, I'm afraid posting will be light.
Sumate has received hundreds of reports of fraud from citizens, civil associations and other organizations [...] Some of these reports have already been investigated and discarted, while others have given rise to more in-depth investigations that will allow, in due time, to demonstrate or rule out the reports of irregularities and to finally uncover the truth.
One of the reports is referred to a series of "patterns" identified in the tallying reports (actas). Sumate is consulting experts and academics in Venezuela and abroad who are carrying out a detailed and exhaustive analysis of these cases. So far, they do not constitute a convincing proof of fraud.
However, we must warn the people of Venezuela that these investigations will take some time.
[...]
A legitimate reconciliation between Venezuelans can only come once all doubts about what happened during the referendum have been cleared up.
We deserve to know the truth. If the result is that the winning option was NO, then NO voters must not feel shame to proclaim it and must not remain under the shadow of suspicion of fraud. If the winning result is the SI, it shall be necessary to proceed to the necessary correction to recognize the will of the Venezuelan people.
Deep down, I'm now 99% convinced that there was no fraud and the government won cleanly. However, I can't make a final judgement until I read and consider Sumate's final report. Until then, I'm afraid posting will be light.
August 22, 2004
60-40?
From my inbox...
You know, when I first saw the CNE results, I assumed fraud. The weird hour, the huge spread, and the strange look on Carter's face when he and Gaviria came out of the CNE offices at 1 am....
But now I think I believe these results are accurate... or nearly accurate. I won't go into the debate over evidence (or lack of evidence) of fraud. But on a more general note, when you say in your "Realities" entry that the country is back to a "60-40" split, I don't know if I agree. Let's assume Chavez won, fair and square. I don't think that means 60% support him. I think it's a mis-reading of that vote. I think maybe 40 points of the 60 are loyal chavistas... but the other 20 is a bunch of people who would like to see someone else in charge, but don't see who it could be. These middle 20 (and I don't call them ni-ni, because that misses the point) simply did the math: If Chavez were kicked out, they would have to endure a month of Pres. Rangel and a big, chaotic presidential campaign, and when all was said and done, Chavez would be back in Miraflores by the end of September. I think that middle 20 percent regarded that possibility, sighed a heavy sigh, and said What the hell, let's leave bad enough alone.
When the opposition looks at the CNE results, it interprets them as 60% pro-Chavez, and, seen that way, of course the results look fraudulent. There's no way 60% of Venezuelans are chavistas. But that's not what the 60% really denotes... I think.
You know, when I first saw the CNE results, I assumed fraud. The weird hour, the huge spread, and the strange look on Carter's face when he and Gaviria came out of the CNE offices at 1 am....
But now I think I believe these results are accurate... or nearly accurate. I won't go into the debate over evidence (or lack of evidence) of fraud. But on a more general note, when you say in your "Realities" entry that the country is back to a "60-40" split, I don't know if I agree. Let's assume Chavez won, fair and square. I don't think that means 60% support him. I think it's a mis-reading of that vote. I think maybe 40 points of the 60 are loyal chavistas... but the other 20 is a bunch of people who would like to see someone else in charge, but don't see who it could be. These middle 20 (and I don't call them ni-ni, because that misses the point) simply did the math: If Chavez were kicked out, they would have to endure a month of Pres. Rangel and a big, chaotic presidential campaign, and when all was said and done, Chavez would be back in Miraflores by the end of September. I think that middle 20 percent regarded that possibility, sighed a heavy sigh, and said What the hell, let's leave bad enough alone.
When the opposition looks at the CNE results, it interprets them as 60% pro-Chavez, and, seen that way, of course the results look fraudulent. There's no way 60% of Venezuelans are chavistas. But that's not what the 60% really denotes... I think.
The Carter Center Report on the last phase of the Venezuelan Recall Referendum
The Carter Center has maintained an office and a director in Venezuela since September 2002, at the invitation of the Government of Venezuela and the opposition Coordinadora Democratica. The Center was invited by the National Electoral Council (CNE) to observe the recall referendum process beginning November 2003. The Center has organized five international observer delegations between November 2003 and August 2004, and maintained a longer-term team to observe the four month verification process from January-April 2004.
The Center has performed its role as invited international observers in a neutral, objective manner, respecting the sovereignty of the country and the authority of the CNE. Our role has been to inform the Venezuelan public and international community about the process, to provide evaluation and suggestions to the CNE, and to help ensure transparency and peacefulness of the entire process.
Throughout these eight months we have worked with the CNE to have the access we need and to increase the transparency of the process for the Venezuelan people. We have insisted throughout the process that the definition of fraud consists of an identifiable pattern of bias in favor of or against one party. Irregularities due to administrative difficulties or random statistical effects should affect both sides and should not have an impact on the outcome.
During the signature verification period, the government Comando Ayacucho raised questions about fraud and we suggested instruments to test these concerns, indicating that a significant pattern must be found before classifying irregularities as fraud. Our own evaluation concluded that sufficient signatures were gathered to trigger the recall referendum. We expressed clearly and in public our discrepancies with some of the CNE decisions, especially regarding the so called ?planillas planas? (similar handwriting) and the possibility for signers to ?repent? and remove their signatures during the repair period.
After the recall referendum, the opposition Coordinadora Democratica has raised questions about fraud and we have again suggested various instruments to test these concerns. We will describe below the tools we have used to come to our conclusion that the vote results announced by the CNE do reflect the will of the Venezuelan people.
Observation of the Recall Referendum of August 15, 2004
The referendum on August 15, 2004 rejected the petition to revoke the mandate of President Hugo Chavez. The observation of The Carter Center mission confirms the results announced by the National Election Council announced Wednesday, in which the ?No? vote to recall President Chavez received 59% and the ?Yes? vote received 41% of the votes cast.
The Carter Center, in coordination with the mission of the Organization of American States, fielded a team of international observers from 14 countries. Beginning July 1, 2004, the Center deployed in Caracas an advance team to observe preparations for the recall, monitor the media coverage and access, and observe the pre-election simulations and audits. Two days before the vote, teams of two observers were sent to the states and the capital district.
The Carter Center mission observed the qualitative aspects of the election as well as the new state-of-the-art automated voting system. Overwhelmingly Carter Center observers found a calm environment on balloting day, with thousands of voters waiting long hours for the opportunity to cast their ballot. Given the amount of time it took some voters to cast their ballot, it is clear that the voting process, including relevant polling administrative procedures, fingerprint machines, and the automated voting machines, should be reviewed and swifter voting procedures should be put into place for future elections.
Testing the Automated Voting System
Noting the questions that have been raised about the automated voting system, the Center is providing more detail about our review of that system. The assessment of the automated system consists of three components: I) Voter to the machine; II) Machine to the CNE server; III) Totalization of the votes within the CNE server.
I) Voter to the machine: does the touchscreen voting machine by Smartmatic accurately reflect the vote cast by the elector?
To assess this question, the CNE organized an audit the night of the election to count the paper receipts (comprobantes) in order to compare them with the electronic results (actas). We supported this process, but were only able to observe a small number of the audits because we were conducting our own quick count at the closing of the polls. In addition, the CNE reported that of the 192 machines chosen in a sample whose drawing we observed, only 82 were audited the night of the election due to the very late hour that many voting stations closed and due to misunderstanding of some of the auditors of the instructions. The results of that audit reported by the CNE were a discrepancy of only 0.02% between the paper receipts and the electronic results recorded in the actas.
Due to the incomplete nature of the CNE audit on August 15, our own limited ability to observe that audit, and continued opposition doubts about the machines after the vote, the OAS and The Carter Center proposed on August 17 to the National Electoral Junta (JNE) of the CNE a second audit to compare the paper receipts with the electronic results. This audit is being conducted August 19 -21. The preliminary results of this audit confirm that the machines correctly registered the voters? intent.
Chronology of the audit proposal.
· In designing the audit, we consulted Sumate, members of the Coordinadora Democratica, and with Rectors Zamora and Rodriguez.
· President Carter then described our proposal in a press conference on Tuesday, August 17.
· The morning of August 18, the OAS and Carter Center explained to the Coordinadora how our audit proposal would detect the irregular patterns in the results that they suspected. We then went to the CNE to finalize the proposal with the JNE. The Carter Center obtained a copy of the computer program that would be used to draw the sample, and was prepared to share that program with the political parties.
· The Coordinadora decided not to participate in the audit.
The audit was carried out as follows:
· A random sample of 150 voting stations (mesas) was drawn on the evening of August 18 in the presence of the OAS and Carter Center and with our prior examination of the Pascal program used to draw the sample. An observer from the OAS or Carter Center was in place in most of the military garrisons (guarniciones) around the country which guarded the voting materials, before the sample was drawn. The observers then watched the CUFAN identify most of the designated boxes, and in every case accompanied those boxes via helicopter and truck to the location of the audit in Caracas.
· On the morning of August 19, 21 teams of CNE auditors and 25 observers from the OAS and Carter Center, along with witnesses of the Comando Maisanta and other international observers, and security from the CUFAN, began to count the paper ballots and compare them with the actas and the cuadernos. The CNE auditors and the observers worked long hours in a careful and detailed way to count the paper ballots, and stopped work at any moment that an international observer had to step away from the table.
· Today, August 21st, the CNE as well as the OAS and Carter Center head of mission Mr. Cesar Gaviria and Dr. Jennifer Mc Coy, presented the results of the audit to the public showing there were no fraud.
II) Machine to the CNE server (transmission): to measure the accuracy of the transmission, The Carter Center and the OAS performed a quick count (a projection of the results based on a statistical sample of the vote results at the mesas). Our observers watched the closing of the voting station and recorded the number of votes, calling these in to our headquarters where we could statistically project a result. Our results coincided with the CNE?s results with less than one percent difference. Sumate?s quick count is another test of the transmission.
III) Totalization within the CNE: The Carter Center took a sample of the results from the CNE?s server and made a projection of the final results, confirming the accurate totalization within the CNE server. Sumate?s parallel count of a large number of the mesas also confirms these results, as reflected in the press conference given by Sumate on August 17.
With regard to the concerns of the opposition about the coinciding results within mesas (the alleged caps or topes), after a careful scrutiny of the electronic data, we found 402 mesas with two or three machines that had the same result for the SI, and 311 mesas with two or three machines with the same results for the NO. We found
this similarities very strange and we made consultations with 2 foreign experts. Both confirmed our own and the OAS experts? opinions expressing not only is this mathematically possible, but since both NO and SI votes are affected, this indicates a random occurrence and not a pattern of fraud.
Conclusions
The Carter Center concludes that the automated machines worked well and the voting results do reflect the will of the people. Our quick count also included manual voting stations, and very few concerns were raised about these. We hope these conclusions will give the Venezuelan people confidence that the automated system functions well, particularly as the regional elections are approaching. The Center will make a Final Report to the CNE with the assessment of the overall process and specific recommendations to improve it.
The unusually high turn-out of 73% reflects the intense interest in this recall referendum. The Venezuelan people are to be commended for standing in line for hours without incidents, in this demonstration of civic participation and pride.
We urge all Venezuelans to accept these results and look to the future. The 41% of the population who voted for a change in the presidency have legitimate concerns that should be addressed. We urge the government to recognize the rights and the concerns of this large minority and to engage in discussions with them to create a common vision for the future of Venezuela. We also urge those in the minority to look for ways to work constructively with the government to achieve the dreams of all Venezuelans.
Recommendations:
In order for Venezuela to move forward to the next electoral process scheduled for late September to choose governors and mayors, we respectfully suggest some steps that will help raise confidence in the process and ensure greater efficiency:
Automated systems are the wave of the future, but citizens need to have confidence in new systems. Although we believe the voting machines worked very well, we believe further assessment and information about such automated systems from other computerized companies would help to inform the Venezuelan people about all types of automated systems.
The CNE suffered from lack of internal coordination and communication, impeding the ability of the directorate to make timely decisions and the organization to work efficiently. We urge increased communication, coordination, and sharing of information among the directors and the divisions of the CNE.
Transparency is the fundamental basis of trust. At times during this past eight months, the lack of information from the CNE to the Venezuelan public, the political parties involved, and the international observers, raised unnecessary concerns and suspicions. We urge greater transparency at all of these levels to ensure confidence in future electoral processes.
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