Venezuelan recall
Editorial
Stabroek News
June 18, 2004
After so many obstacles had been thrown in the path of the holding of a recall referendum in Venezuela, the opposition initially appeared a little nonplussed when the National Electoral Council (NEC) announced last week that enough votes had been cast in favour of such a poll, and when President Chavez indicated his acceptance of it. Of course, that does not mean that everything will go smoothly from here on. To begin with, there is the matter of the framing of the question for the referendum, when the electorate will be asked whether President Chavez should be allowed to continue in office to the end of his elected term or not. According to a Bloomberg report on Wednesday, the NEC has settled on some truly impenetrable language, namely: "Do you agree with rendering ineffective the people's mandate given through legitimate democratic elections to the citizen Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias as president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for the current presidential period?" (It must be said that it reads no better in Spanish than it does in English.)
From the opposition's point of view, the convoluted formulation of the question is not an insuperable problem, since they can always mount a campaign which says, just vote 'yes'! However, there are other more troubling issues. The main one is the proposed use of touch-screen voting machines which are being imported from the US, and which have given rise to security and reliability concerns. The manufacturers of both the hardware and the software which will be used in the recall exercise have never had their equipment tested in a real election. According to the International Herald Tribune, in April California banned the use of 14,000 touch-screen machines in November's US presidential election. The report went on to say that the state of Ohio had found that electronic machines from the four biggest companies in the country had "serious security flaws," and that in numerous states there had been technical problems with the machines which security experts had deemed lacking in "safeguards against computer hackers."
In view of the security issues, the Venezuelan opposition had requested that observers do a simultaneous audit of the electronic vote, based on the receipts from the machines, but this request has been denied by the NEC. Now, said the Tribune, the opposition was no longer seeking a complete audit, but simply one based on a sample of perhaps 400 machines out of a total of 12,000. Whether even this will be allowed, however, remains to be seen. In any case, there have been some suggestions from NEC officials that they may limit the role of international observers at least, more particularly those from the OAS and Carter Center, on the grounds that they are biased. However, it is possible that this is just empty rhetoric, since if President Chavez wins the poll, he would need observers - especially the OAS and the Carter Center - to confirm its credibility.
The recall referendum is now slated to be held on August 15, although fears have inevitably been expressed that it could be postponed. The significance of the date lies in the fact that if the population votes in favour of a recall before August 19, then a general election would have to be held within a month. If it comes after that date, then there would be no election, and the current Vice-President, Mr Rangel, would serve out the remainder of Mr Chavez's term of office. This, the opposition feels, would be to allow President Chavez to continue his control of the government, albeit from behind the scenes.
There are other possible complications. It is not absolutely clear whether it is indeed sufficient for the referendum to be held before August 19 in order for a general election to be triggered in the event of a 'yes' vote, or whether it is that the results must be declared by that date. It is true that the Vice-President of the NEC, Mr Ezequiel Zamora, has said that the results, whenever released, would be viewed as taking effect before August 19, but not all analysts are convinced that that interpretation of the law is sustainable.
Then there is the matter of whether even if the outcome of a recall referendum is declared before August 19 and that outcome requires an election, President Chavez would be allowed to stand as a candidate. This too is constitutionally unclear, despite a ruling on Tuesday by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court that a President may run for office in the next term after being recalled. However, according to the Caracas daily El Universal, this still does not clarify whether President Chavez would be able to run in the election immediately following a recall vote.
This issue, like the one mentioned above, could conceivably end up again in Venezuela's Supreme Court - a court whose complement of judges was last month increased by the legislature from 20 to 32 in a very close vote. As a consequence, its political balance has now been altered in favour of the governing party. It should be added too that the general perception is that those whose sympathies lie with the government also hold the balance in the NEC itself by a margin of three commissioners to two.
For the time being, polls suggest that President Chavez would lose a recall referendum, although whether that situation will remain unchanged until August 15 is impossible to predict. According to the BBC, what the polls are also suggesting is that perhaps as much as 30% of the electorate doesn't like either the government or the opposition, although analysts say this segment is allied with the opposition for the moment. However, while these voters might be in favour of cutting short President Chavez's term, they do not want a return to the old discredited politics of Venezuela. Yet despite the fact that the opposition needs their votes, and despite the fact that it might have to face a general election, it still does not have a single candidate for the presidency, any policy which it has outlined for the electorate, or any programme to tackle Venezuela's massive poverty.
If the Democratic Co-ordinator, the opposition umbrella organization, cannot offer the Venezuelan electorate real alternatives to President Chavez's approach to government, and put up a single leader to whom everyone gives allegiance, then the whole recall effort would have been an exercise in futility. As things stand, it is still on the cards that President Chavez could lose a referendum, and still win the general election which might follow.