The Geopolitics of Election Approval: The US Response to Honduras and Venezuela - marmar
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marmar Tue Dec 17, 2013, 06:44 PM
The Geopolitics of Election Approval: The US Response to Honduras and Venezuela
Tuesday, 17 December 2013 09:37
By Lauren Carasik, Susan Scott and Azadeh Shahshahani, Truthout | News Analysis
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In Honduras, unlike in most countries in Latin America, voting tables are staffed solely by representatives from the parties, with no trained and unbiased election officials around - a system that Jennifer McCoy of the Carter Center told us she considered seriously flawed. Indeed, we saw the system's shortcomings when we confirmed rumors of the pervasive sale of voting table credentials by some of the smaller parties to the National Party, creating a disproportionate National Party presence at the voting stations. The OAS had previously identified concerns about the security of the software used by the TSE and made a number of recommendations, only some of which were remediated in advance of election day.
Compounding concerns about the integrity of the voting process was the climate of fear in which the election took place. Brutal repression since the coup has created a human rights crisis in Honduras, with 18 LIBRE activists killed in the year-and-a-half preceding the election, and three more murdered on the eve of the elections, along with targeted killings of human rights defenders, land rights and indigenous activists, members of the LGBT community, journalists and lawyers. Bribery and threats also compromised free elections. During the campaign, and even on election day, cards offering retail discounts were distributed to voters by National Party representatives. People reported being threatened with loss of their jobs and cessation of cash payouts (the World Bank-funded Bono 10 Mil program) if Hernandez lost the election.
But because widely-reported instances of bribery, violence, intimidation and the consolidation of power in the National Party of all branches of government do not constitute "fraud" under the election rules, LIBRE's legal challenge to the election was limited to the fraud evidenced by the discrepancies in the official documentation.
As members of the National Lawyers Guild, we observed some incorrect tallying of votes occasioned by National Party dominance at voting stations, but it was the chaotic circumstances at the large centers like the Las Mercedes center that made the voting there so conducive to fraud. The totaling and drafting of the actas was done after dark in badly lit rooms, and then taken several hundred meters to a small room with several scanners by two (out of 16) voting table representatives. A large group of representatives was massed outside the scanning room, in the rain and dark, waiting to pass their actas over the heads of others to be scanned by student TSE "custodians." There was no oversight of the scanning process by party representatives or domestic or international observers, and some credentialed observers were asked to leave some centers during the counting process and locked out of others. None of these irregularities was investigated by the TSE.
The Honduran election process and the US response stand in vivid contrast to the presidential elections in Venezuela eight months ago. With a high-tech electoral system that Jimmy Carter called the "best in the world" and which even the Venezuelan opposition called "blindado" (armored against fraud), Nicolas Maduro was declared president with 50.61 percent of the vote on April 14, 2013.The US government has yet to recognize the results of that election and has promoted a baseless challenge by the opposition that continues to this day in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). It is no secret that the United States would have preferred the victory of conservative candidate Henrique Capriles in the hopes of demobilizing the coalition of left-leaning governments in the hemisphere inspired by Hugo Chavez.
More:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101680777