On Caracas Chronicles, blogger Francisco Toro has invited readers to contribute to an ambitious project aimed at creating an electoral map of Venezuela, parish by parish. The outcome is an impressive tool, developed by Dorothy Kronick, Christian Font, and Javier Rodriguez Rivas, which allows users to check and track electoral results in Chavez’s Venezuela from 1998 to the present.
The topic of electoral fraud has been a contentious issue among Venezuelans since the recall referendum on August 15, 2004. After extensive negotiations involving chavista officials, opposition leaders, and international figures from the Organization of American States (OAS) and Jimmy Carter’s Center, Venezuelan electoral authorities, under Chavez’s control, declared he had won the referendum. Even today, it is a well-known fact that many agreements made by all parties were violated by chavista electoral authorities. Notably, former OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria publicly denied Jimmy Carter’s statement after the referendum, which claimed that international observers had monitored the vote count at the electoral council’s headquarters in Caracas. In reality, only Jorge Rodriguez and his chavista team witnessed the count, which ended in a ‘stunning victory’ for Chavez, with nearly 20% more votes. Additionally, subsequent audits were deemed a farce, a sentiment echoed by Carter Center’s second-in-command, Jennifer McCoy, in emails to me.
After this, Chavez launched an aggressive propaganda campaign to reinforce the idea that he possessed a legitimate popular mandate to conduct Venezuela as he saw fit. The discussion didn’t stop there, as many respected Venezuelan academics began extensive statistical research to highlight the improbability of Chavez’s referendum win. Some of their findings have been published in internationally recognized peer-reviewed statistical journals. Another group of Venezuelans established ESDATA, meticulously documenting various aspects of chavista fraud.
In Venezuela, everyone has formed opinions on this matter, leading to two distinct camps: on one side, chavistas and deniers, along with what I’d term opposition collaborationists—those who pretend that elections are legitimate. On the other side are those of us unconvinced by the electoral results due to overwhelming evidence against it and the absence of meaningful scrutiny since 2004, making it hard to accept Chavez’s electoral officials at face value. Anyone observing the balance of pro- and anti-Chavez officials in Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, their ‘career advancements’ within chavismo after leaving the council, how crucial decisions have been managed, the full backing of state resources for Chavez, and the inflated electoral roll would conclude that elections in Venezuela are essentially a sham.
Francisco Toro aligns with the deniers. He believes there is no proof of electoral fraud in Venezuela, despite being aware of and having written about significant gerrymandering, disproportionate representation, and the misuse of state resources to benefit Chavez. He argues that the artificial inflation of the electoral roll is related to “well-oiled registration drives” and the population’s “ageing.” However, using the tool he requested his collaborators to create reveals staggering instances, like Unare parish in Bolivar state, where registered voters increased from 26,087 in 1998 to 73,634 in 2009—a staggering 282% rise. Another example is Francisco Aniseto Lugo parish in Delta Amacuro state, where the electoral roll surged by 525%, with Chavez often achieving a perfect score, sometimes capturing 100% of the votes.
To any critical observer, this stands as substantial evidence of large-scale electoral rigging. In areas without opposition observers during voting—often the case in rural Venezuela—Chavez receives inexplicable percentages. Unintentionally, Francisco Toro may have permanently undermined the “there’s-no-evidence-of-fraud-in-Venezuela” argument posited by chavistas, deniers, and collaborationists alike. For that, as well as for the remarkable tool, we should all be exceedingly grateful.