More on Venezuela's Election

I'm late on the blog front today -- sometimes life intervenes -- but look for several posts this afternoon.

First, two academics in the U.S. have released a study arguing that the chances that last month's vote on a referendum on Chavez were most likely fraudulent. According to today's WSJ ($), "The claims were made Sunday by Ricardo Hausmann, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and former chief economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, and Roberto Rigobon, a professor of applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.

"The pair issued a report that tried to measure the possibility that the vote was clean using two separate analyses of the official results. In both cases, they said, the chances of a clean vote were less than one in 100."

Their study is backed up by Aviel Rubin, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins, who told the Journal: "'The Hausmann/Rigobon study is more credible than many of the other allegations being thrown around.'" Rubin added, "'I would encourage the Venezuelan government to open up all aspects of the election to public inspection, not just to selected observers. That includes all of the paper ballots, the source code in the voting machines, the random generators ... that were used to pick the sites to audit.'"

Naturally, the Chavez regime dismissed the new study and referred to the imprimatur handed to the government by the Carter Center and the OAS as proof that the election was above-board. Chalk up another win for Jimmy.

The academics claim that the sample of results from voting machines used to validate Chavez's victory weren't random. To back up their claims, they created a control for the results:

"The academics used another technique to look for suspicious patterns in the results, using the 2003 petition and an exit poll on the day of the vote as a vague measure of a voter's intention. Because both measures are imperfect for different reasons, the academics argued, the measures should make different mistakes in predicting the final result.

"But the academics found that each method had similar margins of error when compared with the official results, something that would happen only one in 100 times without fraud, they argued."

Again, the Journal is at the forefront of this story. More as I learn it.