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>>BTW, any Venezuelan bloggers out there blogging about the election...in an honest fashion?<<

...and another:

http://vcrisis.com/index.php?content=home

He only offers fear

Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual

The candidate of continuity is feeling in his spine the chill of uncertainty and the fear of losing. He feels the ground moving and that his gunpowder is wet. Up to now, he has only made two new electoral offers, the creation of a single party and his indefinite reelection. Everything else is the same scratched vinyl that not even his supporters listen to anymore. But, besides this, in the face of this empty electoral offer, he resorts without shame to the use of fear as an electoral instrument. Not happy with having created a generalized atmosphere of fear in the whole country, he now devotes his time to scare his own voters. His last witticism was that of “warning” that if Rosales wins “the Cubans” (That’s exactly what he said, he did not even mention the doctors) would be kicked out of the country and Barrio Adentro would be eliminated.

One would think that such a ridiculous argument would be left aside by the candidate of continuity and given to his minions of fourth or fifth level and he would continue navigating the skies of the debate of ideas that VP Rangel is calling for. The squalidness of his last “massive” rallies, his reluctance to visit the popular barrios, the certainty that recently he has been screwing up way above his usual standards on that matter, have led him to personally assume the handling of the campaign of fear.

He is going to fail. He is sub estimating the intelligence of his listeners; nobody can be that stupid to believe that Rosales, who has presented a social program (“Mi Negra”) aimed at taking care of the needs of the poorest sectors of our society, at the same time that he implements economic and employment programs to promote investment and create jobs, could have in mind eliminating social programs. In fact, the Zulia Governorship maintains a whole set of them, much better implemented than those of the central government, which represent the best counter argument to the strategy of fear.

With respect to the social programs (“Misiones”), the policy will be one of assembling them with “Mi Negra”, freeing them of the corruption, waste and political sectarianism that accompanies them today, to guarantee their clean management and that access to them is not conditioned to any sort of party toll.

Barrio Adentro will be opened to Venezuelan medical doctors, to base it on Venezuelans and not on foreign professionals.

As long as the presence of these is necessary (because the substitution of such numerous personnel is not possible overnight), their contract with them will no longer be a mystery and will be made in an open and clearly budgeted way. Only someone brain dead would eliminate a primary medical assistance system like Barrio Adentro. But you can be sure that Barrio Afuera, that is the hospitals and health clinics that are today bare, will be the subject of a special program for their recovery and endowment.

The serpent has bitten its own tail. Fear has now reached the Great Terrorizer of the county.

This blogger is probably on the optimistic side.

Would you like to be fingerprinted?

http://daniel-venezuela.blogspot.com/

Finger printing the Venezuelan voter

There are some debates that I try to avoid as I deem them “trapos rojos” (decoys), thrown by chavismo (and some time opposition) to distract people from the real issues. Perhaps the most famous one is the CNE fraud machinery, something that chavismo loves to see opposition politicians discussing instead of discussing all of the Chavez administration shortcomings where they would have a field day. In this Chavez benefits from the tendency of some politicians to favor comfortable A.C. TV studios to campaign against Chavez in lieu of hitting the dirt roads and humble neighborhoods, just as Rosales is doing these days, to great success. Then again, there is a reason why Rosales has become the unity candidate of the opposition and one reason why the Ledezmas and AD and others are left in Caracas pondering whatever happened to them.

But on occasion I must visit these electoral issues anyway and today it is the finger printing machines.

First, in an acknowledged reference to the increasing power of blogging, the recent debate one the usefulness of fingerprinting machine is making it more to newspapers, even if credit is not fully awarded. Nothing surprising there, newspapers everywhere are afraid of the power of good blogging and Venezuela is becoming fast a region full of excellent bloggers. Not necessarily because we are a particularly bright sort, but because we have to deal with such wily adversaries and compensate for a rather deficient press in matters of in deep and long ranging investigations. In particular when there is a lot of numbers involved, such as PDVSA or electoral issues, journalists are not too happy preferring to devote themselves to more scandalous and front pages news such as the Anderson case, nearing its Nth star witness, and no where near completion.

This El Universal expediente, based in part on the work of Bruni and Miguel, simply questions the suitability of the finger printing machines for the goal they were bought for. That is, it seems that the electronic investment that should be made to have a real time verification of the finger print of an elector has not been made. Thus one legitimately can wonder what is the real use of the finger print machines. Miguel wisely does not speculate much on it, but since it well known that I am unwise I am not afraid to thread that path.

Let’s focus on the problem briefly.

The elector reaches its voting station. His finger print is lifted and sent electronically to Caracas. There it is compared to a data bank which is now above 10 million prints (recent ID delivering operations were combined with finger print collection which allow me to guess that, adding finger prints collected at elections, as much as 10 million finger prints already exist at the CNE, which by the way does not come clear on such numbers).

It is quite obvious that the process requires sometime and can be only carried away with super fast computing system of which there is no clear evidence that it exists in the bowels of the Caracas CNE. From bloggers’s work, the time delay seem unacceptable to allow a free flowing election day, with the added risk that the system could come crashing at any time. When one looks at the expense bestowed on a system that offers no guarantees, one wonders which are the real reasons, when the traditional ink died finger seems to work as well as the finger printing machines at a fraction of the cost!

So, which could be the reasons?

Someone made a buck out of it. Jorge Rodriguez, a former obscure public servant who became the CNE head that forced through the finger printing system, lives now in regular splendor in Altamira, and crashes brand new Audi late at night. The reader may draw its own inferences.

The finger printing machines are really destined for some other usage. Two possibilities here.

By careful selection of the centers from which the finger print data is collected, chavismo can figure how the voting progresses. With the help of the Tascon (1) list the government can determine very easily how strongly the opposition electorate is making its presence felt at the ballot box, and how many chavistas are actually voting. This precious information, already available by mid morning, could spur some reaction from the government, ranging from ferrying in a haste chavistas that tend to stay home to preparing an actual electoral fraud by reprogramming some voting machines such as it is alleged to have happened at the Recall election of 2004, with now rather good evidence.

The other possible political usage of the finger printing machines is to scare away the opposition voter from the ballot, while forcing the chavista voter to participate if s/he wants to retain its misiones benefits. This is very simple to do once the perception of loss of the vote secret has permeated the population. It does not matter actually whether the finger printing machines can actually pierce the secret of the ballot, it is enough to have people think it can. And in the country of the Tascon list this notion is indeed very simple to put in people’s mind.

Thus it is clear to perceive where lies the real interest of the finger printing machines: psychological war against any opposition campaign effort. It is thus good strategy that Rosales has refused to get burdened by a sterile debate on finger printing which only can be won by the government. Instead, if Rosales manages a strong movement that has a chance to unseat Chavez, then the finger printing will become a non issue as people will not care to risk been pegged voting against Chavez since this one will not be around to harass them.

Very simple indeed, and yet another mark on how well Rosales is running his campaign so far, refusing to let Chavez set the agenda.

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1) the Tascon list is the list of the names of all people that have signed the Recall election petition and who have since been branded enemies of the regime. Many of these people have met all sorts of discrimination. With time the Tascon list has created a modern apartheid when to it was added the names of all the people that were receiving misiones benefits and thus rated as pro Chavez. This new Maisanta list is widely used in many government offices to decide who gets what. References on the right side of this page.