Venezuela’s Electoral Council Agrees to Opposition Petition

Venezuela's five principal directors of the National Electoral Council.
Credit: El Universal


University students marched to the headquarters of the CNE to show their support.
Credit: Aporrea/Leonardo Cantillo

Caracas, Venezuela, June 30, 2006—Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) unanimously approved a petition by three presidential candidates to observe the audit of the voter registry. The three candidates that submitted the petition were Teodoro Petkoff, Julio Borges, and Manuel Rosales, who are considered to be the three strongest candidates to challenge President Chavez in the presidential election of December 3, 2006.

Technical experts affiliated with the campaigns of the three candidates will now be allowed to observe the audit currently in progress, which is being conducted by experts from seven of the country’s universities. “They will be integrated with sufficient time, so that they can learn what has been done and how it has been done,” said CNE President Tibisay Lucena.

The participation of the presidential candidates “will not constitute a complementary or parallel audit,” said Lucena. The only new aspect to the audit is that additional observers have been invited.

The CNE also announced that it would definitely be conducting a post-vote audit of ballots by manually counting 53 to 55% of the votes, with the exact number depending on the number of voting centers that will be set up. Some opposition groups, such as Súmate, have demanded that 100% of the ballots be counted manually. Venezuelan law, however, specifies that the vote count be automated, for which Venezuela uses voting machines that print auditable paper ballots.

Opposition groups have strongly questioned the validity of the voter registry over the past year, saying that they suspect that many names in the registry are not legitimate voters. In response, the CNE hired an agency of the Inter-American human Rights Institute, CAPEL, last year, to audit the registry. CAPEL released its results earlier this year, concluding that the accuracy of the voter registry fell within acceptable international standards, with a less than 5% error margin.

Despite that audit, opposition groups such as Súmate and opposition presidential candidates argued that the CAPEL audit was methodologically flawed and insisted that it be allowed to audit the registry. The CNE refused, arguing that the registry’s information, such as addresses, is protected by citizens’ right to privacy. Instead, the CNE offered to allow experts from ten of the country’s main universities to come forward with audit proposals and to conduct the new audit. The audit proposals of seven of the universities were accepted, while the proposal of three of the larger universities, was rejected.

CNE President Lucena also said that the three universities currently not participating in the audit would be welcome to join the process at any time.

Students March in Support of CNE

Yesterday, shortly before the CNE’s announcement about the audit, university students gathered in Caracas to demonstrate support for the CNE. Students from 32 different universities gathered at Plaza Venezuela, in the geographic center of Caracas, and marched to the CNE headquarters, which is located several miles to the west, in the capital’s historical center.

The president of the student federation of the University Romulo Gallegos, Omar Ojeda, told the state news agency ABN, “In this electoral year students take up the historical commitment of confronting internal factors that follow international mandates to destabilize the country.”