Venezuela's Maduro blasts 'devil' Obama

[reorg]

24. yes, it's pretty much impossible

Last edited Sun May 5, 2013, 02:31 PM - Edit history (3)

Your comparison with the 2000 presidential election shows that you don't know much about the Venezuelan system and probably not much more about the one in Florida either. There is nothing high-tech about hanging chads, or purging voter rolls of blacks, or closing polling stations early and so forth.

The electronic voting system in Venezuela has a paper trail, 54% of the ballot boxes, randomly chosen, are automatically audited. This prevents any attempt at cheating with the electronic tabulation.

The opposition claims their witnesses were thrown out of some polling stations. The numbers vary, first they said it happened to 286 witnesses, later they cited bigger numbers, up to 550 or so, I believe (the number of polling stations is 13,810). Odd that no such complaint was filed with the CNE, as observers have confirmed, and not a single such incident has been reported in the press.

They also claim that the voter rolls are not reliably purged of the names of deceased persons. This is most likely true, but there has no evidence been presented to show that ID cards of deceased persons have actually been used in attempts to cast fraudulent votes.

They also made some claims which were immediately shown to be false representations of facts. "In some districts, Maduro got more votes than Chávez in October, in one polling station 1,000% more, in another one the number of votes he got was higher than that of registered voters!!! Pictures of ballots being burned were printed in newspapers aligned with the opposition and posted by TV stations on their Twitter accounts -- a complete fraud because these pictures were taken from the CNE website and were several years old.


So, that's why I asked: Do you have any ACTUAL evidence or are you engaging in wild speculations based on vague comparisons with the vastly different and much more chaotic system in Florida, where Bush "won" by a few hundred votes whereas Maduro had a margin of almost 250,000?

(edited for more precision and some links)