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Edited on Mon Sep-27-10 01:43 PM by JackRiddler
To those who follow the corporate media's daily practice of assaulting the Venezuelan people for freely choosing the wrong leaders (in a half-dozen elections since 1998), it was fully expected that they would come up with some means of discrediting yesterday's election results (which yielded the expected victory for the Chavez party).
One of today's corporate media attacks was predictable. They would hail the large gains for the opposition. Never mind that this was inevitable, because the opposition had boycotted the last election and thus were guaranteed to make gains by contesting the current one.
Otherwise, we are treated to the claim that "the opposition" received 52 percent of the votes cast, although the Chavez party won more than 60 percent of the seats in parliament.
First of all, this claim comes from leaders of the anti-Chavez parties themselves, and is based on incomplete results, mainly from their strongholds. It remains to be seen just what the final results will be.
Second, this math ignores that one of the parties they are lumping in with "the opposition" is actually to the LEFT of Chavez, and broke off from Chavez's party because they wanted a more committed program of change. They received 7 to 10 percent of the vote.
Third, even if the total number of votes for parties other than Chavez's turns out to be a majority, it should be noted that like the United States, Venezuela has a single winner in each district. Unlike the US, Venezuela has more than two parties. That means the biggest party wins in each district, even if they don't get a majority.
Consider this example: In all the reporting on European elections, the corporate media always report something like, "Christian Democrats triumph in Germany," even though the CDU never gets an absolute majority. This is because there are many parties in Germany, but the one with the most votes (almost always) gets to form the government. They win the election, even if they didn't win a majority of seats outright, and the fact that they didn't get a majority plays no role in news coverage. (I would argue that it should; at least that the numbers should always be given prominently.)
The same thing just happened in Venezuela -- the winning party didn't get a majority of all votes. This is the case in most other elections in the world.
It may happen in the 2010 elections in the US -- i.e., if you add up all votes in all districts, one party may come out ahead and yet lose most of the district-by-district elections.
Each district vote will yield only one representative, regardless of whether the result is a landslide or a close shave. Turnout will usually be higher in close races than in expected safe seats. (I'll be voting in New York, but damned if it will matter in my own Congressional district, where the incumbent will be getting 80 percent no matter what.)
Thus "52 percent voted against Chavez" is a talking point that could be applied to almost any other governing party in the world, but isn't -- except for Venezuela, of course.
For those who remember, the same bogus attack was used on Clinton after the 1992 election -- that only 43 percent voted for him, and therefore 58 percent were in the "opposition." Never mind that Perot's share would not have all gone to Bush (or anything of the sort). In the right-wing logic, any non-Clinton vote was therefore a vote against Clinton, period.
Right wing math will always lie. And you could be certain that it wouldn't have mattered what happened in VZ yesterday -- the corporate press would have come up with ways to attack Chavez as a "dictator"!
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