Right wing Venezuelan talking points: "Paper ballots can't be trusted."

[stickdog]

Chavez's opponents say that massive fraud was committed, but they DON'T want a random audit of the election results. To "explain" their bizarro logic, they first floated this doozy:

http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=ACC93DAB-B90B-4FAA-8C49B32B7227DDC3

Anti-Chavez legislator Nelson Rampersad said Wednesday opposition politicians will not approve the recount of paper ballot receipts because they believe the fraud was committed by tampering with the voting machines, not the receipts.


But the obvious follow up question, of course, is "why in the world wouldn't auditing these 'receipts' demonstrate any supposed discrepancies?" So, they later updated to this:

Rampersad claimed touch-screen voting machines in at least 500 polling sites produced the exact same number of "yes" votes in favour of ousting Chavez, a result he said was statistically impossible. He said the supposed finding indicated the machines were rigged to impose a ceiling on "yes" votes.

The audit intended to compare electronic and paper ballots. But Rampersad said opponents were concerned the paper ballots - which have been under the care of Venezuela's military - may have been tampered with since Sunday's votes. He said the opposition wanted the audit to include an examination of the internal workings of the machines' software.


But if they were so concerned about who was watching the paper ballots, why in the hell weren't THEY watching them along with the military? And do they really expect anyone to believe that hundreds of voting machines were all rigged with the same numerical cap on the 'yes' vote AND that the devious, untrustworthy people they left in charge of watching the paper ballots knew exactly which of these machines were perpetrating fraud AND somehow swapped out the real paper ballots with fake ones that exactly matched both the purportedly fraudulently constant undercount of 'yes' votes AND the randomly differing numbers of 'no' votes?

In any case, wouldn't a random physical audit of paper ballots ALWAYS be desirable for anyone trying to allege fraud in good faith, if only to see if such an audit would uncover any indisputable evidence of tampering, inconsistency or less than perfect matches between the physical fraud supposedly committed by the military and the programmatic fraud supposedly committed by whoever rigged the voting machines? I mean, can you imagine any sane person who was alleging fraud BOYCOTTING the one and only sure means to prove it?

And what do right wing politicians have against physically verifying who voted for what, anyway? That they don't want to audit the votes when they win at least makes sense in its typically cutthroat "Cheney yourself" right wing way, although James Baker's 2000 claims that "machines count better than people" were both patently absurd and disgustingly disingenuous. (I wanted to ask him, "How would you propose confirming that any putative new counting machine is functioning accurately without manually verifying a few test runs? For example, if some machine announces that you have seven fingers, who are you -- a mere human -- to argue, right?")

But in this case, they LOST the election, they are howling "Fraud!" from here to kingdom come -- and they STILL don't want to count the friggin' votes!

Just how stupid do these folks think their intended audience is? If their side won by a single disputed vote, they'd be chanting, "Get over it, you sore loserman conspiracy theorists!" But since the good guys won instead, everybody's bending over backward to conduct a transparent, random partial physical, manual audit -- which is the only logically possible way to uncover their claims of fraud. And these jokers actually have the gall to pretend that the very act of verifying the results is itself some sort of federal offense!

Finally, why does our idiot whore "liberal" media continually strive to provide "balanced coverage" to the point that they constantly see fit to report all manner of blatant lies and logical absurdities (for example, "70% of Americans think Saddam did 9/11") without bothering to inform the public that what they just read was an obvious line of shit?

[jeff30997]

1. Completely ridiculous.They sound like Freepers.

[stickdog]

2. That's the trouble. They want to use freeper-types to spread the meme

that paper ballots can't be trusted, ensuring that trust in an election becomes PR battle rather than an auditing issue.