Capriles still defiant on eve of Venezuela vote recount

[joshcryer]

43. Just release the data.

It's the most uncontroversial thing ever.

I keep saying that if the Chavistas want to marginalize Capriles they should simply do it.

Certainly López Obrador was highly marginalized by Felipe Calderón who acquiesced on the fraud allegations that López Obrador made back in 2006 in Mexico. Indeed, Capriles is following the López Obrador model completely, by calling for protests (which Obrador did and and Capriles is going to do again May 1st). Of course when Obrador did it (twice) he was cheered as a man of the people and for the people. Capriles is called a treasonous fascist (typical with the double speak used so frequently on these forums).

My thinking is simple. They know that the rolls are not tight and they are afraid that their incompetence will be shown so they're not releasing the data. It's likely that the whole fingerprinting thing was a fiasco from the beginning (the Carter Center admonished them for simply using them to scare people about the secrecy of the vote; and it worked because the students certainly protested it).

The real irony is that the system is supposed to be designed so that an audit of this magnitude would be able to very trivially prove each vote was legitimate, and so simply providing the data would, even if there are irregularities, make the system more robust in the future.