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<h1 class="title">Washington Seeks Observers That it Can Influence
in Venezuela’s Election</h1>
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<p class="byline"> By <span class="author">Mark Weisbrot - The
Huffington Post</span>, <span class="date">November 25th 2015</span>
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<div class="block-inner"><b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11720">http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11720</a></small></small></b><br>
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<p>In Washington it’s just seen as the way the world works. Just as
big fish eat little fish, and lions prey on antelope, so there is
no moral shame in the U.S. government trying to undermine,
destabilize, or get rid of democratically elected governments that
it doesn’t like.<br>
<br>
So it is no surprise that the multi-pronged effort to
de-legitimize the elections for Venezuela’s National Assembly,
scheduled for December 6, would be reported, and widely accepted
here without question, as merely trying to insure “<a
href="http://web.archive.org/web/20151022132623/http:/blog.crisisgroup.org/latin-america/2015/10/13/venezuela-elections-2015-no-room-for-credible-observation/"
data-cke-saved-href="http://web.archive.org/web/20151022132623/http:/blog.crisisgroup.org/latin-america/2015/10/13/venezuela-elections-2015-no-room-for-credible-observation/">credible
observation</a>” for the election. The “credible observers,”
who are being portrayed as the <em>sine qua non</em> of a
“credible result,” are the OAS (Organization of American States).<br>
<br>
To see how absurd this assumption is, we need only look back a few
years, when the OAS appointed an “Expert Verification Mission” to
examine the presidential election in Haiti. This Mission did
something outrageous, something that has never been done – before
or since -- in the history of electoral monitoring: It reversed
the result of the first round of voting, <a
href="http://web.archive.org/web/20151022132732/http:/www.cepr.netwww.conservativenannystate.org/documents/publications/haiti-oas-2011-10.pdf"
data-cke-saved-href="http://web.archive.org/web/20151022132732/http:/www.cepr.netwww.conservativenannystate.org/documents/publications/haiti-oas-2011-10.pdf">without</a> conducting
a recount or even a statistical test. Normally, when an election
result is disputed, there is recount, or the result is accepted,
or a new election can be held. Nowhere does an electoral
monitoring team simply pick a new winner.<br>
<br>
In February of 2011 I was on a panel with Fritz Scheuren, the lead
statistician of the OAS Mission, which was carefully chosen so
that six of seven members were from the U.S., Canada, and France
(yes, France was included although geographers claim that it’s not
part of the Western Hemisphere). A former President of the
American Statistical Association, he <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022173535/http:/www.cepr.net/events-archive/the-elections-flawed-beyond-repair"
data-cke-saved-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022173535/http:/www.cepr.net/events-archive/the-elections-flawed-beyond-repair">acknowledged</a> that
the OAS mission used no statistical inference to draw conclusions
from the 8 percent of tally sheets that they examined.
Statistical tests conducted by CEPR, including a comprehensive set
of simulations for missing votes, <a
href="http://web.archive.org/web/20151022132732/http:/www.cepr.netwww.conservativenannystate.org/documents/publications/haiti-oas-2011-10.pdf"
data-cke-saved-href="http://web.archive.org/web/20151022132732/http:/www.cepr.netwww.conservativenannystate.org/documents/publications/haiti-oas-2011-10.pdf">confirmed</a> that
there was no statistical basis for the Mission’s reversal of the
voting results.<br>
<br>
The political reasons became more obvious when Haiti’s government,
understandably, balked at accepting the OAS decision. With the
country still devastated from the 2010 earthquake, U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations, Susan Rice, <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022133406/http:/usun.state.gov/remarks/4959"
data-cke-saved-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022133406/http:/usun.state.gov/remarks/4959">threatened</a> Haiti
with a cut-off of desperately-needed aid if they did not accept
the OAS Mission’s reversal of election results. Michel Martelly,
Washington’s preferred candidate, was then moved up and into the
second round and became president, which he remains today.<br>
<br>
It seems unlikely that the OAS could get away with something like
this in Venezuela. But they can contribute to destabilization
efforts. In 2013, the Venezuelan opposition took to the streets
with violent protests, claiming “fraud” in the presidential
election. There was <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013510101743343447.html"
data-cke-saved-href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013510101743343447.html">no
basis</a> for their claims of fraud: A statistical test of the
election audit showed that the probability of getting the official
result if the election were in fact stolen through fraud was <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022134923/http:/www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-election-audit-05-2013.pdf"
data-cke-saved-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022134923/http:/www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-election-audit-05-2013.pdf">less
than one in 25,000 trillion</a>.<br>
<br>
This high level of certainty was possible because of Venezuela’s
dual voting system, where voters press a touch screen computer and
then receive a printout of their vote. The voter then looks at the
printout and deposits it in the ballot box. When the polls close,
a random audit of 54 percent of the machines is conducted, in
which the machine tally is compared with the paper ballots in the
presence of witnesses from all parties. The microscopically small
probability of fraud, despite the fact that in this case President
Maduro won by a margin of 1.6 percentage points, is a result of
the enormous random sample size, as any student of introductory
statistics can verify.<br>
<br>
Yet there were three international voices in 2013 that joined with
the opposition and refused to recognize the results, demanding a
“full recount”: the U.S. government, the right-wing government of
Spain, and – tellingly -- the head of the OAS at that time, José
Miguel Insulza. Although the U.S. has suffered <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022135034/http:/www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/20/venezuela-revolt-truth-not-terror-campaign"
data-cke-saved-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022135034/http:/www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/20/venezuela-revolt-truth-not-terror-campaign">humiliating
defeats</a> in trying to win votes against Venezuela at the OAS,
Washington still contributes about 40 percent of the
organization’s budget, and of course it has other levers of power
against individual governments and their representatives. There
are therefore many examples of its manipulating the OAS machinery.
That is why the Latin American governments in 2010 formed the
Community of Latin American and Caribbean Nations (CELAC), which
includes all governments in the hemisphere except the U.S. and
Canada.<br>
<br>
For all of these reasons and many more, any government that has
been a major U.S. target for regime change for more than a decade
would have reason to be wary of OAS observers. Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Uruguay, the U.S. and Canada are among the countries that
have not been interested in having the OAS observe their
elections. Playing on the public’s lack of knowledge of recent
history, almost every source for the major media is pretending
that the OAS is just a neutral and necessary institutional
guarantee against fraud. The <a
href="http://web.archive.org/web/20151022132623/http:/blog.crisisgroup.org/latin-america/2015/10/13/venezuela-elections-2015-no-room-for-credible-observation/"
data-cke-saved-href="http://web.archive.org/web/20151022132623/http:/blog.crisisgroup.org/latin-america/2015/10/13/venezuela-elections-2015-no-room-for-credible-observation/">International
Crisis Group</a>, <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022173445/http:/www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/151008/hrw-calls-for-international-observation-in-venezuelas-congress-vote"
data-cke-saved-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022173445/http:/www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/151008/hrw-calls-for-international-observation-in-venezuelas-congress-vote">Human
Rights Watch</a>, and <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905135325/http:/www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/07/29-venezuela-elections-zovatto"
data-cke-saved-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150905135325/http:/www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/07/29-venezuela-elections-zovatto">Brookings
Institution</a> have all piled on. And why wouldn’t they? The
pretense of disinterested observer, not beholden to the powers and
dictates of empire, is the same on which their own identity is
established. But many of these players have a <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022140124/http:/www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/12/17/more-100-latin-america-experts-question-human-rights-watchs-venezuela-report"
data-cke-saved-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022140124/http:/www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/12/17/more-100-latin-america-experts-question-human-rights-watchs-venezuela-report">particularly
sketchy</a> track record on Venezuela over the past decade. The
media, for its part, is reminiscent of the McCarthy era of the
1950s: dissent is absent, even from reports that might normally
include a contrarian opinion as a matter of journalistic balance.<br>
<br>
The last decade in Venezuela has seen a series of failed efforts
to negate election results there (a brief review of some of the
more audacious scams, with links, can be found <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022141247/http:/www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/05/venezuela-elections-voting-trustworthy-polling"
data-cke-saved-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151022141247/http:/www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/05/venezuela-elections-voting-trustworthy-polling">here</a>).
They include bogus statistical studies by U.S. academics (2004),
fabricated polls by prominent U.S. pollsters (2004 and 2006), a
2005 opposition boycott of parliamentary elections, the 2013
efforts described above. Not to mention attempted military coups.
The opposition has never won a national election in Venezuela
since Hugo Chavez was first elected in 1998. This time they think
they might win, and they have polls to support that assertion.
However, a lot depends on turnout, which has been their weakness
in non-presidential elections; and there is a big political
difference between getting, e.g. a simple majority or two-thirds
of the assembly. Hence the pre-emptive strike to discredit the
elections: If they do worse than they expect to do, they will
claim fraud. And the hardliners, at least, will continue on their
extra-constitutional path towards regime change. This has been –
with U.S. support -- plan B (and sometimes plan A) for most of the
past 16 years, despite the fact that there has not been a shred of
credible evidence of electoral fraud during that entire period.</p>
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