The decline of American influence: Venezuelan case study

Mark Weisbrot, The Guardian, via t/o

Washington’s efforts to de-legitimise the [Venezuelan] election mark a significant escalation of US efforts at regime change in Venezuela.
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But the Obama team’s effort failed miserably. On Wednesday, the government of Spain, Washington’s only significant ally supporting a “100% audit” reversed its position and recognised Maduro’s election. Then the secretary general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, backed off his prior alignment with the Obama administration and recognised the election result.

It was not just the left governments of Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay and others that had quickly congratulated Maduro on his victory; Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti and other non-left governments had joined them. The Obama administration was completely isolated in the world.

Washington’s clumsy efforts also helped highlight the election as an issue of national sovereignty, something that is deeply cherished in the region.
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The opposition representative on the national electoral council, Vicente Díaz, acknowledged that he had “no doubt” that the vote count was accurate.

I don’t expect my government to do something because it’s right or to abstain from doing it because it is wrong. But when they do something wrong in a way that damages even the greedy self-interest of the nation, then that government does not deserve to be in power.

Right now, Venezuela and all of Latam is giving us the finger.

The Voting Rights Act is Obsolete in Colorblind America

Dara Kam and John Lantigua, Palm Beach Post:

A new Florida law that contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters, former GOP officials and current GOP consultants have told The Palm Beach Post.
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Former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer says …“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” … “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.

“They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue,” Greer said. “It’s all a marketing ploy.”

The GOP will say that they wanted to exclude Democrats and didn’t care what color of skin they had, that they’re criminals but not racist crininals

I’ll give odds that white Democratic precincts didn’t have lines anywhere near as long as African American or (non-Cuban) Hispanic ones.

(oh… the title of the post is ironic, in case that wasn’t clear)

Lying for Jesus, True-the-vote style

Joseph Mismas, Plunderbund, via War on Error:

Yesterday we reported that True the Vote was attempting to place observers at precincts in Central Ohio, focusing on African American districts. We also noted that there might be some problems with the forms they submitted to the Franklin County Board of Elections (FCBOE).

The FCBOE met today and determined that True the Vote had likely falsified the forms submitted for general election observers. The new observer forms, filed over the past few days by True the Vote representative (and Hilliard Tea Party Member) Jan Loar, used candidate signatures copied from a previous set of forms filed in early October

All but one of the six candidates whose names appeared on the original form had withdrawn permission to use their signatures prior to the submission of today’s forms. During the BOE meeting Candidate Terri Jamison spoke up to say her name was “forged” on the latest round of forms.

The form for appointing observers reads ‘election falsification is a 5th degree felony’. Election officials have confirmed that there will be a post-election investigation of True the Vote.

Plunderbund is doing good work out of Ohio.

More vote fraud!

Via Atrios:

A Clackamas County [Oregon] elections worker is under criminal investigation for tampering with ballots, WW has learned.

The underlying allegation is that the woman, whose name has not been released, filled in blanks on ballots turned into the county for the Nov. 6 general election.

Sources familiar with the incident say their understanding is that the woman filled in a straight Republican ticket on the ballots where preferences had been left blank by voters.
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The Clackamas County Elections office is no stranger to controversy. Two years ago, Elections Clerk Hall mistakenly put a county commission race on the May ballot, although it was not scheduled until November.

Democrats are asking whether this is a one-off or part of a larger effort.

Aside: This is an example of why paper ballots are not a panacea.

Vote baaing scandal in Mexico

From La Jornada:

At the trial before the electoral tribunal regarding election fraud in Mexico, the PRD presented evidence that included two turkeys, a lamb, a chicken, two ducks and a piglet which were used to buy votes in Guerrero, Campeche, Zacatecas and Veracruz.

(photo from SDP Noticias)

A lamb? There was definitely vote baaing going on.

That was the downscale merchandise. More upscale included cell telephones, perfume, a dress, umbrellas, and tortilla makers.

Farther up the ladder were gift/credit cards from Buen Vecino, Bancomer, Banamex Perfiles, Monex Loyalty Master Card, Soriana Tamaulipas and Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart. Money laundering. Hm.

Mexico in the interregnum/updated

“Your bullets cannot kill my hope.” (Image from @FabioLA_Grinch)

The activity on #YoSoy132 is impressive. There is a march against Televisa Chapultepec, with the authorities putting up perhaps 100 officers. AMLO is proposing an interim president, and the PRI is accusing him of trying to bring on anarchy. The elections court has coyly dismissed complaints by individual citizens, claiming that only the parties have jurisdiction. YoSoyAntiFraude is counting the “actas,” the numbers reported (as opposed to the “sábanas,” or–loosely translated– precinct sheets) See here for an image, on right of a sábana, and here for an acta. Both images from SDP Noticias via QuePagina. The count of the actas is so far more or less consistent with the official results, so this may come down to evidence that there is inconsistency between the count as initially reported and as transmitted.

Update: Jo Tuckman on Televisa protest.

The reason for transparency in elections: Mexico 2006

Mark Weisbrot, on a little history of why there is such suspicion on the Mexican elections:

But it got worse than that: because of public pressure, the Mexican electoral authorities did two partial recounts of the vote. The second one was done for a huge sample: they recounted 9% of the ballots. But without offering any explanation, the electoral authorities refused to release the results of the recount to the public.

From 9-13 August 2006, the Mexican electoral authorities posted thousands of pages of results on the web ,which included the recounted ballot totals. It was then possible, with hundreds of hours of work, to piece together what happened in the recount and compare it to the previous results. At the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), we did this for a large random sample (14.4%) of the recounted ballots. Among these ballots, Calderón’s margin of victory disappeared.

This may explain why the electoral authorities never told the public what the recount showed, and why the authorities refused to do a full recount – which would have been appropriate for such a close election with so many irregularities. A full recount could easily have reversed the result, or found the election to be completely indeterminate.

So, six years later, tens of millions of Mexicans believe that the election couldn’t have been clean.

I’ll bet President Romney will be surprised when tens of millions of Americans who were denied the chance to vote by corporate money being used to bribe state legislatures into passing voter suppression laws will feel they have no stake in his sham presidency. “Well, gosh,” he’ll say. “We bought it fair and square! What are they angry about?”

I guess we can take comfort in the fact that he’s just someone else’s puppet

Lisa Wines, Wonkette, via Mexfiles:

Peña Nieto, during what he calls a “difficult time of crisis” in his first marriage to Monica Pretelini, cheated on his wife with two different women and had two children outside of his marriage.
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Ashleymadison.com, the dating website for married people, proudly put Peña Nieto on a billboard in Mexico City, saying, “Unfaithful to his family. Faithful and committed to his country.”
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Agustín Humberto Estrada Negrete, a former director and teacher at a school for children with special needs, claims to have been Peña Nieto’s homosexual lover for seven years
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Estrada Negrete claims that Peña Nieto’s wife discovered him and Peña Nieto inflagranti and an argument between husband and wife ensued. When Peña Nieto started to beat his wife, Estrada Negrete decided it was time to leave. The next thing he knew, Monica Pretelini was dead.
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On May 12, 2007, Peña Nieto’s deceased wife’s bodyguards were murdered while accompanying Peña Nieto’s three children, their maternal grandparents and aunt in Veracruz. Only the truck of the bodyguards was targeted
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Estrada Negrete lost his job, was arrested twice for minor charges, tortured and gang-raped in jail, had death threats written on the walls of his school and inside his home and finally someone tried to kill him with a plastic bag over his head.
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all is not well in the soap-opera fairy tale of Peña Nieto and Angelica Rivera, his soap-opera star wife. On March 13 of this year, Angelica Rivera was admitted to a hospital, bruised and beaten.

Theater of the Mind: In Mexico, computer tallies amplify suspicions/updated

Update: This link claims that Anonymous has denied hacking the IFE computers. If correct, the screen shot below would be a fabrication. As I posted, what matters is whether people believe election results, and clearly there’s doubt.
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Update: Link to AMLO Q&A.

Editorial by La Jornada
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The following is being presented as a screen capture, allegedly obtained by Anonymous, of an internal screen dated July 2nd (10:35 AM) of the Mexican Institute for Federal Elections:

It shows a commanding AMLO victory at over 90% vote count.

Now, is it for real? That’s less clear. The blog is called Theater of the Lie. The blog author seems concerned about the Masons, not something that tends to make me trust. Someone who’s good with Photoshop can tell me whether those images are likely to be tampered. And CNN claims that the hacker community voted not to touch the IFE computers. But the point is, we have gotten to the point where who knows what to trust? Computer-generated vote counts in a non-transparent and highly-fallible system?

What is clear is that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will challenge the elections.

Now, this is remarkable given the 7 point spread. That would represent a very large theft of votes–millions. More than the reports from the field of alleged thefts suggested to me (although here again, hard data is difficult to come by, since anti-AMLO hackers attacked the website where irregularities were to be reported). AMLO claims 1 million votes bought. The report implies this is just in the state of Mexico, but I think this probably refers to nationwide.

I honestly doubt AMLO would do this unless he had sources telling him that there was something big to find. He’s (IMO) too old to run again. The #YoSoy132 contingent are really fired up. They believe that this election has been stolen. After 2006, who can blame them?

Maybe the powers-that-be can force the genie back into the bottle. My guess is that people are so p–sed off about the inability of the government to make wages rise and unemployment fall that Mexico will become ungovernable. Of course, I thought that in 2006. Depending on your definition of “ungovernable,” you could say I was right or wrong.

Pray for Mexico/updated

Update. Actual results, starting at 6PM Central, here:

http://www.difusorprep-elecciones2012.unam.mx/prep/introduccion.html

http://www.google.com.mx/elections/ed/mx/results

or, via your favorite corporate behemoth, here:

http://www.ife.org.mx/difusores.html

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The kids have put together a resistance movement called YoSoy132, a reference to the Atenco massacre. What looked like a sure thing for the PRI candidate Enrique Pena Nieto now looks like merely a likely thing for P-nieto.

You can follow what’s going on in the election today here.

There are plenty of reports of dirty politics. The cops arresting someone for recording election day bribes. Pencils being handed out at voting booths to make erasures possible. Stolen ballots. Anonymous Mexico claims to have detected electoral irregularities.

Mexico really does deserve better. As Atrios would say, The kids are alright.

It’s just the adults who suck.