Comment by suzzer99
1 year ago
More on this. The Carter Foundation, the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election, and who previously defended Venezuela's election system following Chavez's 2004 win, has called on Maduro's government to release local vote tallies, which apparently it is never going to do: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...
Maduro just responded to a journalist from the Washington Post that they will not be able to show the local vote tallies now because, at this moment, the National Electoral Council is in “a cyber battle never seen before.”
I was curious to check the National Electoral Council website, to get their latest tally straight from the source...
http://www.cne.gov.ve/
And the website is currently not loading. They might simply be struggling to keep up with traffic, but being under some kind of "cyber attack" is also plausible
This would also be fairly trivial to fake if you wanted to appear to be under attack.
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It's cne.gob.ve, and that doesn't work either. They want us to believe that because the website is down, the whole system that counts the votes is down. Hey, maybe the votes are counted in WordPress...
List of fake news anti-Maduro posts https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1818972331424768091
Exactly. You don't need advanced math. You only need to see the tallies for every voting center and make sum. I believe the opposition has already done this. The fact that the government has not done it shows that they just don't have the numbers.
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The issue in this post has nothing to do with any of the outside election observers. You could replace the Carter Foundation with the CIA itself and you'd still be left with the same problem, which is that these vote counts are fictitious.
The comment I’m replying to says they’re “the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election,” so I think the point stands - given their funding and connection to the US government and international capital, they can’t be considered impartial in this situation.
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The Carter Foundation stood up to the US govt in 2004, when they validated Chavez's win. Maybe they became un-impartial since then. But you're assuming a lot.
How should they be funded, for you to consider them impartial?
Not by a country directly opposed to Venezula's government would be a good start.
Is anyone really impartial?
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The National Lawyers Guild twitter profile reads:
"Human rights over property interests since 1937. Fighting for liberation, organizing in solidarity with radical movement leaders."
https://x.com/NLGnews
They are certainly not impartial.
They are impartial if you consider relentlessly pushing radical communist agendas and disregarding information that hurts your political allies to be impartial. More uncomfortable facts: Maduro has killed tens of thousands of political dissidents nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country under his regime [0]. And exit polls overwhelmingly favored the opposition [1].
0. https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/venezuela/#:~:text=Mo....
1. https://www.edisonresearch.com/edison-research-conducts-exit...
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Yeah, and Hitler said he was a national socialist. We don't need to judge truth based on the words found in random twitter bios. We can judge Maduro based on his actions- disappearing the opposition leader and permanently hiding local election tallies are not the actions of someone who trusts vindication by a fair and open system.
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The "National Lawyers Guild" is certainly not impartial, but you can't honestly say that "The Carter Foundation" is either. They pick sides all the time.
I'd never heard of the National Lawyer's Guild. According to Wikipedia:
"The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a progressive public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States."
"Activists" not generally compatible with "impartial". Some coverage of the situation I found very helpful is available here: https://www.readtangle.com/venezuela-elections-explained-mad....
(Edit: Fixed link)
> I'd never heard of the National Lawyer's Guild
This is surprising! I certainly have. Have you heard of the Carter Center? I hadn't till now.
> "Activists" not generally compatible with "impartial".
Hmmm I don't think I agree with this logic. Or, imo, if you took it seriously, you'd have to excuse the Carter Center just as well. Regardless, I don't see how your link supports this statement. It just seems to be an AI summary of a bunch of different articles?
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The numerical problem does not hinge on the reputability of any particular observer organization, though. You can just verify it on a calculator yourself!
Similarly, the call for local vote tallies is not unreasonable. Venezuelan law dictates they should have been made available by the government, and they were not. Though a lot of people took cell phone photos of the voting machine printouts locally; see e.g. the thread at https://x.com/DavidRomro/status/1817782928279007350 .
I'm not sure I understand this battle-of-experts thing happening here. The Venezuelan authorities released the vote totals. They work out to exactly 51.2% vs 44.2%. That did not happen in the real world. Could not have.
We don't need the Carter Foundation to tell us these results are false. They are manifestly false.
That isn't the vote total, it is a provisional count. They're claiming "80% reported" which is already a tell that whoever is putting out the figures isn't treating them especially accurately. It is plausible that the figures are incompetence rather than malice and someone was back-calculating the number of votes from an accurate-enough percentage.
Pretty unlikely though. It isn't that hard to count votes.
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I would say that the obvious rigging of the vote is a desired effect. Ditto for the obviously outlandish accusations of meddling by the Chilean secret service.
I think the message being sent now is: "I can rig the elections, you see it, and you can't do anything about it. I win because I say so." And his supporters see it and are happy that their leader is not a wimp.
Sr. Maduro's friend, Mr. Putin, has been sending the same message last few election cycles, when he's been running for president in umpteen time, despite any limits set by Constitution, etc.
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These aren't the vote totals. This is "80%" of the votes. No one has posted a link to the official statement. Votes are still being counted and we won't have the vote totals for a while
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If you read the addendum to the article they provide a perfectly plausible explanation: namely that (only) rounded percentages were provided to an intermediary and from there they back-calculated the counts.
Given that the US has claimed vote rigging in the past in Venezuela without evidence contrary to the determination of international observers (and has and is trying to overthrow the government to install a US-backed one) claims of vote rigging should be viewed with an enormous amount of skepticism.
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Given the transparently fake vote totals, perhaps we can update our priors on the impartiality of this guild.
Anyone who calls this election fair is not impartial. The scale of the fraud is enormous and undeniable.
Tell me, how many Venezuelans abroad were able to vote? How many were kept out of the country because the borders were closed? How many were threatened or intimidated into voting for Maduro? How many votes were cast using false ID? How many were confused by the ballot which had 13 options to vote for Maduro? How many polling stations were closed at the last minute?
This is a strangely belligerent statement from an organization tasked with being impartial observers. I don’t know what to make of it, but it seems very odd.
edit: The use of the term “opposition” seems like a bit of a tell.
So much the worse for the National Lawyers Guild then! The numbers are undeniably fake.
> The National Lawyers Guild was also an observer
they sent 5 observers only per https://truthout.org/articles/maduro-wins-reelection-for-thi...
If you want to claim to be impartial, you need to make a case that you are not biased. The NLG is far from that.
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I can't find much about the Carter Foundation, but Edison Polling—the organization that released the exit poll that showed the opposition winning— does have a long history of criticism for being US-backed and consistently producing results that favor US interests.
Meanwhile, the most respected pollster in the country, Hinterlaces, released an exit poll that estimated right around the actual results (54% vs 51%)
https://x.com/Hinterlaces/status/1817599369471799639
In addition, there are plenty of other international observers that back the result. Like the National Lawyers Guild
https://nlginternational.org/2024/07/press-release-national-...
As a Venezuelan it baffles me how there can be people trying to support a regime that is only recognized by other authoritarian regimes. A regime with clear violations of Human Rights. Hinterlaces is government funded. There were many exit polls that showed the 60/40 split in favor of opposition. Even if you ignore those we are in an age when you can clearly see the government violently repressing and kidnapping as they are recorded and posted in twitter.
The Carter Center praises Venezuela voting process before. Even if you ignore that the fact is the opposition has published the tallies they have collected while the CNE is still busy doing who knows what (fabricating them).
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Calling Hinterlaces "the most respected" is quiiiite a stretch. The owner Oscar Schemel, frequently parrots the govt propaganda talking points ("it's the evil empire, there's no inflation it's sabotage etc)
All of this seems irrelevant when the official Venezuelan percentages released add up to 109%. They didn't even try to make it look right, even in the most basic ways.
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Maduro is also saying that the mass protests he's facing are the product of Chilean-trained operatives acting against him, he says many things.
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Yeah, and Trump promised to release his tax returns. Around here, our sewage trucks have the word "Political Promises" painted on the side.
>Maduro has already vowed to release election data...
Yeah and everyone's still waiting on D's tax returns.
Promises have to be kept.
Okay. I don't have an opinion. I just think GP's specific wording was misleading
> which apparently it is never going to do