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<h1 class="title">In Venezuela's Upcoming Election, U.S. Seeks
Observers it Can Influence</h1>
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<div class="times"> <span class="posted"> Posted: <time
datetime="2015-11-18T11:06:37-05:00"> 11/18/2015<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot/venezuela-election-us_b_8554750.html">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot/venezuela-election-us_b_8554750.html</a></small></small></b><br>
</time></span><span class="updated"><time
datetime="2015-11-18T11:59:01-05:00"></time> </span>
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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.</p>
<p>So it is no surprise that the multi-pronged effort to
delegitimize the <a
href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/07/29-venezuela-elections-zovatto"
target="_hplink">elections</a> for Venezuela's National
Assembly, scheduled for Dec. 6, would be reported and widely
accepted here without question as merely trying to insure "<a
href="http://go.shr.lc/1Lj9dZw" target="_hplink">credible
observation</a>" for the election. The "credible observers," who
are being portrayed as the sine qua non of a "credible result" is
the Organization of American States.</p>
<p>To see how absurd this assumption is, we need only look back a
few years, when the OAS appointed an "<a
href="http://scm.oas.org/pdfs/2011/CP25512E.pdf"
target="_hplink">Expert Verification Mission</a>" 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 <a
href="http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/oas-in-haiti"
target="_hplink">reversed</a> the result of the first round of
voting, without conducting a recount or even a statistical test.
Normally, when an election result is disputed, there is a recount
or the result is accepted or a new election can be held. Nowhere
does an electoral monitoring team simply pick a new winner.</p>
<blockquote class="pull-quote"> <span class="quote">There are many
examples of the U.S. manipulating the OAS machinery.</span></blockquote>
<p>In Feb. 2011, I was on a panel with Fritz Scheuren, then 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, even though geographers claim that it's
not part of the Western Hemisphere). A former president of the
American Statistical Association, he <a
href="http://www.cepr.net/events-archive/the-elections-flawed-beyond-repair"
target="_hplink">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://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/oas-in-haiti"
target="_hplink">confirmed</a> that there was no statistical
basis for the mission's reversal of the voting results.</p>
<p>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="http://usun.state.gov/remarks/4959" target="_hplink">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, where he remains
today.</p>
<p>It seems unlikely that the OAS could get away with something like
this in Venezuela. But it 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"
target="_hplink">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="http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/a-statistical-note-on-the-april-14-venezuelan-presidential-election-and-audit-of-results"
target="_hplink">less than one in 25,000 trillion</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Yet there were three international voices in 2013 that joined
with the opposition and refused to recognize the results, <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/15/venezuela-election-results-recount_n_3087508.html"
target="_hplink">demanding</a> a "full recount": the U.S.
government, the right-wing government of <a
href="http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/04/15/inenglish/1366035689_485991.html"
target="_hplink">Spain</a> and -- tellingly -- the head of the
OAS at that time, José Miguel Insulza. Although the U.S. has
suffered <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/20/venezuela-revolt-truth-not-terror-campaign"
target="_hplink">humiliating defeats</a> in trying to win votes
against Venezuela at the OAS, Washington still <a
href="http://www.cfr.org/latin-america-and-the-caribbean/organization-american-states/p27945"
target="_hplink">contributes</a> about a third of the
organization's overall budget, and of course it has other levers
of power against individual governments and their representatives.
There are therefore many examples of it manipulating the OAS
machinery. That is why Latin American governments in 2010 formed
the <a href="http://www.celacinternational.org/" target="_hplink">Community
of Latin American and Caribbean Nations</a>, which includes all
governments in the hemisphere except the U.S. and Canada.</p>
<blockquote class="pull-quote"> <span class="quote">The media 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.</span></blockquote>
<p>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://blog.crisisgroup.org/latin-america/2015/10/13/venezuela-elections-2015-no-room-for-credible-observation/"
target="_hplink">International Crisis Group</a>, <a
href="http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/151008/hrw-calls-for-international-observation-in-venezuelas-congress-vote"
target="_hplink">Human Rights Watch</a> and the <a
href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/07/29-venezuela-elections-zovatto"
target="_hplink">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 particularly <a
href="http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/12/17/more-100-latin-america-experts-question-human-rights-watchs-venezuela-report"
target="_hplink">sketchy track record</a> 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.</p>
<p>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="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/05/venezuela-elections-voting-trustworthy-polling"
target="_hplink">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 and the 2013 efforts described above. And
that's not to mention <a
href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/12/americas/venezuela-coup-attempt-foiled/"
target="_hplink">attempted military coups</a>. 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, for example, a simple majority or
two-thirds of the assembly. </p>
<p>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>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
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415 863.9977
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