Monday, June 2, 2008

Results still AWOL: Doubts over 1.8 million ‘missing’ votes in Chavez' bid to reform the Constitution

Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): Six months have gone by and the National Electoral Council (CNE) still hasn't released the full results of the referendum which defeated President Hugo Chavez' bid to reform the Constitution by a narrow official margin of barely two percent. The extended delay hasn't been explained.

The CNE in effect closed the book on the referendum five days after the December 2 referendum by issuing a second bulletin with 94 percent of the votes counted. Since then, there's been no further information.

The CNE has been under question ever since a similarly unexplained wait of nine hours before it announced the "preliminary" results shortly after one o'clock the following Monday morning.

Then, the abstention rate was put at 44.1 percent, based on an electoral register of 16,109,644 people. But the election documents submitted by polling station officials put the total at 14,229,478.

The gap of 1,810,186 is now said to represent votes from 4,542 voting machines that were never counted, or at least published, by the CNE.

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