In Caracas Chronicles, blogger Francisco Toro urged readers to participate in an ambitious project to create an electoral map of Venezuela, parish by parish. The result is an impressive kit, developed by Dorothy Kronick, Christian Font, and Javier Rodríguez Rivas, that allows users to track electoral results in Chávez’s Venezuela, from 1998 to the present.
The issue of electoral fraud has been a hot topic of debate among Venezuelans since the recall referendum on August 15, 2004, when, after years of negotiations involving Chavista officials, opposition leaders, and powerful international figures from the Organization of American States (OAS) and Jimmy Carter Center, Venezuelan electoral authorities controlled by Chávez announced that the referendum had been won. It remains a fact that, to this day, many of the agreed points by all parties were simply violated by Chavista electoral authorities. The former OAS Secretary General, César Gaviria, publicly contradicted Jimmy Carter’s claim that international observers had witnessed the vote count at the electoral council headquarters in Caracas on August 16. The truth is that only Jorge Rodríguez and his Chavista team witnessed the counting, which ended in a ‘resounding victory’ for Chávez, with nearly 20% more votes. Subsequent audits were a farce, as the Carter Center’s No. 2, Jennifer McCoy, admitted to me in ongoing email exchanges.
Since then, Chávez launched a very aggressive propaganda campaign to solidify the notion that he had a legitimate popular mandate to more or less do whatever he wanted with Venezuela, which is what he has been doing. The problem didn’t end there, of course. Teams of highly reputable Venezuelan academics began conducting all kinds of exhaustive statistical research to demonstrate the unlikelihood of Chávez’s victory in the referendum. Some of their work has been published in renowned international peer-reviewed statistical journals. Then, another group of Venezuelans founded something called ESDATA, and they have been meticulously documenting various aspects of Chavista fraud.
In Venezuela, we all have developed opinions on this, and there are two well-defined camps: on one side are the Chavistas, the deniers, and what I would call the collaborative opposition, which includes all those who pretend that elections are legitimate. On the other side are those of us who are not convinced by the election results, simply because the amount of evidence against them, and the fact that no election has been subject to significant scrutiny since 2004, makes it impossible to take Chávez’s electoral acolytes at face value. Anyone who looks at the balance of officials for and against Chávez in the National Electoral Council of Venezuela, their ‘career advancements’ within Chavismo after leaving the electoral council, how major decisions have been handled, how state resources are completely behind Chávez and against the opposition, how the electoral roll has been inflated beyond any reasonable proportion, observing the total absence of independent and meaningful scrutiny during the counting, and exercising a minimum of critical thinking, would conclude that elections in Venezuela are a farce.
Francisco Toro belongs to the denier camp. In his opinion, there is no evidence of electoral fraud in Venezuela, despite being fully aware and having written about massive gerrymandering, disproportionate representation, and misuse of state resources in favor of Chávez. He maintains that the artificial and inexplicable inflation of the electoral roll is related to “well-oiled registration campaigns” and “ageing” factors in the population. However, when one uses the tool he asked his collaborators to create, examples can be seen, such as in the parish of Unare, in the state of Bolívar, where the number of registered voters increased from 26,087 in 1998 to 73,634 in 2009. That’s an increase of 282%. Another example, in the parish of Francisco Aniseto Lugo, in the state of Delta Amacuro, where the electoral roll has increased by 525%, Chávez often maintains an almost perfect score, sometimes reaching 100% of the votes.
For any critical observer, this is sufficient evidence of large-scale electoral fraud. When no opposition collaborator is present during voting, typically in rural Venezuela, Chávez obtains inexplicable percentages. Inadvertently, Francisco Toro may have forever nullified the hypothesis of “there is no evidence of fraud in Venezuela” shared by Chavistas, deniers, and collaborators alike. That’s why, and because of the fantastic tool, we should all be extremely grateful.