Universities to Audit Venezuela’s Electoral Registry

Caracas, Venezuela, June 10, 2006—Venezuela’s National Electoral Council announced on Wednesday that seven Venezuelan universities had accepted an invitation to audit the country’s electoral registry, which opposition leaders suspect to be very flawed. Three of the country’s main universities, though, so far refuse to participate because they disagree with the audit procedure.

According to the National Electoral Council (CNE), the purpose of the audit is to complete an audit that the CNE conducted with the technical help of an electoral consulting group (CAPEL) of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights last year.

The issue of the accuracy of Venezuela’s electoral registry has recently become one of the main issues of dispute between the opposition and the CNE. Opposition leaders say they suspect that too many people are improperly registered to vote and that this is a possible basis for fraud on the part of the government.

The electoral registry has increased from 12 to over 15 million in the past three years, mainly because the government has been engaged in an extensive voter registration drive. Currently a far higher percentage of Venezuelans are registered to vote than was historically the case.

With the opposition focusing on the validity of this registration effort, the CNE began to audit the registry last year, with the help of CAPEL. Opposition groups, such as Sumate, though, criticized this effort as not having been sufficiently independent and as having suffered from various technical problems.

CAPEL audited the entire electoral registry of 14 million registered Venezuelans, checking it for duplicate ID numbers, duplicate names, and other inconsistencies. CAPEL also examined databases of deceased, the citizenship registry, and visited a random sample of 14,000 registered voters at their registered address. For one of the potentially most likely causes of voter fraud, whereby the same person votes more than once, using the name of a deceased person, CAPEL found 54,951 cases. It concluded, though, that, “None of the sensitive inconsistencies, which are determinant for the reliability of the electoral registry surpassed 5% of the allowed for margin of error.”

So as to increase confidence in the registry, the CNE agreed to accept proposal from the country’s universities to expand and deepen the audit that CAPEL had initiated. The CNE examined the proposals and on Wednesday announced that it would accept the audit procedure proposed by seven of universities and rejected the proposal of three other universities (Universidad Central de Venezuela, Universidad Simon Bolivar, and Universidad Católica Andrés Bello).

The main differences between the audit proposals involve whether the electoral registry would be compared to statistical demographic data. The three dissenting universities argue that the registry should be compared to demographic data about the country, so that one might be able to tell whether the registry is representative of the population as a whole. The CNE, though, insists that the audit should only be compared to actual voter data on record (such as registration forms) and to the voters themselves (looking them up in their homes).

Antonio Paris, the director of Venezuela’s largest university, the UCV, said that the three dissenting universities would present a new proposal to the CNE on Monday, in the hope that it would be accepted. “We hope that the CNE thinks about it and accepts it,” said Paris.

The CNE director in charge of the audit procedure, Sandra Oblitas, similarly said that the universities’ revised proposal would be, “received with good spirits.” However, their proposal could not, “break with the [audit] in progress, with what we have already established, [then] it can of course be incorporated,” said Oblitas.

While all opposition leaders condemned the CNE’s decision not to accept the three universities’ proposal, there was some dissension about what this means for future participation in the electoral process. Presidential candidate Teodoro Petkoff, for example, said, “These conditions pose the necessity to me to seriously think about the viability of [my] and of all candidacies.”

Julio Borges, the candidate of the opposition party Primero Justicia also rejected the decision, but said to the universities that are working with the CNE, “I ask you to do this [audit], we will conduct our own audit…”

Similarly, Maria Corina Machado, one of the leaders of Sumate, argued that the universities that were accepted for the audit were those that are in the hands of the national government. The CNE had accepted “those organizations whose criteria coincide with the plans of the CNE which, by chance, are institutions of the national government, whose directors are also named by the government,” asserted Machado.

The director of the Experimental University Romulo Gallego, Jaime Gallardos, which is participating n the audit, disagreed with this reasoning, saying, “If we assume that the [participating] universities are of the government, then all of them are, because it is the executive that provides the resources [to all universities].”