Jimmy Goes Down

Mary Anastasia O'Grady is proving to be the Dorothy Rabinowitz for Venezuelans. Just as the irrepressible Ms. Rabinowitz wrote exhaustively in the WSJ about the horrendous and illegal jailing by Massachusetts of members of the Amirault family, so Ms. O'Grady keeps coming back to Venezuela's recent election. I think today's Journal column ($), wherein she notes that the EU refused to monitor the election because of Chavez's insistence that they accept significant limits on their monitoring capabilities, is fatal to Carter's reputation, such as it is. When even the EU can't find a reason to support an anti-American leader, you know something's up.

Such as: "Given how Jimmy Carter's presidency turned out, it is not surprising that he is desperate to salvage his legacy as an international election observer. That effort took a turn for the worse this week when verifiable reports emerged conflicting directly with Mr. Carter's rendition of what happened in the Aug. 15 Venezuelan recall referendum. The Carter claims of omniscient oversight aside, testimony from reliable independent sources shows that the process did not meet any impartial standards of fairness. To start with, observer rules were absurd, so much so that although the European Union wanted to play an observer role, it graciously declined in the interest of honesty. 'Unfortunately, it has not been possible to secure with the Venezuelan electoral authorities the conditions to carry out an observation in line with the Union's standard methodology,' the European Commission declared."

This is damning, because it reveals Jimmy's letter to the editor of the Journal to be as vacuous as I charged at the time. He omitted the details either because he's so naive and ignorant that he really doesn't know them, or because they would sink his case that Chavez didn't steal the election.

I don't claim to be either a computer whiz or an elections expert, but anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the modern world should understand that electronic voting machines can be programmed to manipulate results. The only way to ensure fairness is to allow objective monitoring of elections, and a large part of that must include the freedom to inspect the software of those machines. Ms. O'Grady supplies some stats:

"To support his case, Mr. Carter keeps repeating in the press that Súmate had the same "quick count" as he did. This only creates confusion because 'quick count' totals are merely the sum of totals coming from Chávez-controlled voting software. The only way to check the accuracy of the government's claim of "victory" was to count ballots. But as Súmate describes in clear detail, Mr. Chávez blocked that process: 'When the authorities decided against counting the ballots, the CNE agreed to a very limited audit with the other actors of the process, to count the ballots of only 1% of the ballot boxes, in other words, 192 ballot boxes. Only 76 of the 192 ballot boxes were audited, concentrated in 20 of the 336 municipalities around the country. Promoters of 'SI' [Chávez's opposition] were present at only 27 of these audits while international observers were present at only 10 tables. Inexplicably, this did not represent a cause for concern or alarm to the international observers who endorsed the partial results issued by the CNE without that fundamental piece of information.'"

More statistics that reveal at least highly questionable voting patterns can be found at the Salon blog Venezuela. He cites the work of two Venezuelans who are Professors in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bruno Sanso and Raquel Prado, to show highly irregular patterns from the official voting results as compared with the exit polls that Carter and other Chavez supporters reject.

A Journal editorial yesterday ($) hits State for its absurd, self-defeating response to the bad news: Unquestioned embrace of the hemisphere's newest dictator. "On Monday, a Foggy Bottom spokesman declared that, 'In order to address those charges of election fraud, an audit was conducted. The audit found that -- did not find any basis to call into doubt the results of the elections.'
As 'audits' go, however, this was akin to Arthur Andersen scrubbing Enron. The sample for the audit was selected by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which is controlled by Mr. Chavez, and was too small to be considered statistically reliable."

A message for Venezuelans: Elements of the conservative press here, joined by bloggers and (I assume) some talk radio hosts, are your friends. The State Department, run by pro-status quo lackeys who rarely meet a dictator they don't embrace, former President Carter, who knows a thing or two about hugging thugs, and the mainstream press are happy to see you go under the boot heel of Chavez.

Stay tuned.