The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, September 10, 2004
Venezuelan election WAS stolen...
...and stolen despite the "best efforts" of Jimmy Carter:
Doug Schoen, is a very respected Democratic Party pollster. He was President Clinton’s favorite pollster, and remember that Clinton was so obsessed by polls that he once conducted a survey to determine where he should take his summer vacation in 1996. Schoen was a busy man during the Clinton years. Schoen’s firm, which was hired by an opposition group in Venezuela, conducted pre-election surveys, and also undertook a large exit poll on the day of the Chavez recall. His pre-election surveys indicated that those who wanted to recall Chavez were ahead by at least 10%, and gaining momentum. In his exit poll, the margin for the anti-Chavez side grew to 18%. Schoen expressed disbelief when the results showed that Chavez retained his office by the same 18% margin. That, of course, is a 36% swing from an exit poll conducted the same day, or about six times the margin of error in terms of a vote shift. We are talking here of many standard deviations away from the expected result. That result is about as likely as Osama Bin Laden agreeing to be on Bill O’Reilly’s show in person tomorrow night.
Another oddity that was revealed in the days following the election was the remarkable similarity in the vote count for one side or the other on individual voting machines. On over 400 voting machines, the anti-Chavez vote was identical -- down to the single vote. The most prominent defender of Chavez’s election win, Jimmy Carter, responded in an op-ed that this meant nothing, since on over 300 polling machines, the vote to retain Chavez was also identical. One thing that Carter did not mention, however, was whether the vote for Chavez on the 300 machines, was higher than the vote recorded against Chavez in the other 400. Clearly, if the fix was in, one could record a maximum result for the anti-Chavez side on some polling machines (regardless of how many people voted against Chavez, in all likelihood a larger number) and also record a vote total for Chavez on other machines that was much higher than the actual vote total for Chavez.
The Wall Street Journal also has a column about this up today:
The new study was released this week by economists Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Roberto Rigobon of MIT. They zeroed in on a key problem with the August 18 vote audit that was run by the government's electoral council (CNE): In choosing which polling stations would be audited, the CNE refused to use the random number generator recommended by the Carter Center. Instead, the CNE insisted on its own program, run on its own computer. Mr. Carter's team acquiesced, and Messrs. Hausmann and Rigobon conclude that, in controlling this software, the government had the means to cheat.
"This result opens the possibility that the fraud was committed only in a subset of the 4,580 automated centers, say 3,000, and that the audit was successful because it directed the search to the 1,580 unaltered centers. That is why it was so important not to use the Carter Center number generator. If this was the case, Carter could never have figured it out."
Mr. Hausmann told us that he and Mr. Rigoban also "found very clear trails of fraud in the statistical record" and a probability of less than 1% that the anomalies observed could be pure chance. To put it another way, they think the chance is 99% that there was electoral fraud.
Doug Schoen, is a very respected Democratic Party pollster. He was President Clinton’s favorite pollster, and remember that Clinton was so obsessed by polls that he once conducted a survey to determine where he should take his summer vacation in 1996. Schoen was a busy man during the Clinton years. Schoen’s firm, which was hired by an opposition group in Venezuela, conducted pre-election surveys, and also undertook a large exit poll on the day of the Chavez recall. His pre-election surveys indicated that those who wanted to recall Chavez were ahead by at least 10%, and gaining momentum. In his exit poll, the margin for the anti-Chavez side grew to 18%. Schoen expressed disbelief when the results showed that Chavez retained his office by the same 18% margin. That, of course, is a 36% swing from an exit poll conducted the same day, or about six times the margin of error in terms of a vote shift. We are talking here of many standard deviations away from the expected result. That result is about as likely as Osama Bin Laden agreeing to be on Bill O’Reilly’s show in person tomorrow night.
Another oddity that was revealed in the days following the election was the remarkable similarity in the vote count for one side or the other on individual voting machines. On over 400 voting machines, the anti-Chavez vote was identical -- down to the single vote. The most prominent defender of Chavez’s election win, Jimmy Carter, responded in an op-ed that this meant nothing, since on over 300 polling machines, the vote to retain Chavez was also identical. One thing that Carter did not mention, however, was whether the vote for Chavez on the 300 machines, was higher than the vote recorded against Chavez in the other 400. Clearly, if the fix was in, one could record a maximum result for the anti-Chavez side on some polling machines (regardless of how many people voted against Chavez, in all likelihood a larger number) and also record a vote total for Chavez on other machines that was much higher than the actual vote total for Chavez.
The Wall Street Journal also has a column about this up today:
The new study was released this week by economists Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Roberto Rigobon of MIT. They zeroed in on a key problem with the August 18 vote audit that was run by the government's electoral council (CNE): In choosing which polling stations would be audited, the CNE refused to use the random number generator recommended by the Carter Center. Instead, the CNE insisted on its own program, run on its own computer. Mr. Carter's team acquiesced, and Messrs. Hausmann and Rigobon conclude that, in controlling this software, the government had the means to cheat.
"This result opens the possibility that the fraud was committed only in a subset of the 4,580 automated centers, say 3,000, and that the audit was successful because it directed the search to the 1,580 unaltered centers. That is why it was so important not to use the Carter Center number generator. If this was the case, Carter could never have figured it out."
Mr. Hausmann told us that he and Mr. Rigoban also "found very clear trails of fraud in the statistical record" and a probability of less than 1% that the anomalies observed could be pure chance. To put it another way, they think the chance is 99% that there was electoral fraud.
