Venezuela’s Guide to Election Theft Americans have a legal path when a vote is disputed. Chávez denied all recourse. Mary Anastasia O’Grady
https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-guide-to-election-theft-11606684680?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
“Venezuelans never got their day in court, but Americans still get theirs. In the interest of securing the confidence of the electorate, court challenges ought to be allowed to play out.”
On Wednesday six plaintiffs filed a civil action in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, the secretary of state and four others. The complaint alleges “massive election fraud” to help Joe Biden win the Nov. 3 election for president.
It further alleges “the fraud was executed by many means, but the most fundamentally troubling, insidious, and egregious is the systemic adaptation of old-fashioned ‘ballot-stuffing.’ ” This was “amplified and rendered virtually invisible by computer software created and run by domestic and foreign actors for that very purpose.”
The plaintiffs want Georgia to decertify the election. The 104-page complaint is now before the federal court, which will review the material presented and make a ruling.
Central to the argument against the governor and his associates is the claim that software used by Georgia was developed by Hugo Chávez—who died in 2013—to steal elections in Venezuela. Critics are dismissing this as a fantastic conspiracy theory. But they should instead welcome and help to air it.
Plaintiffs have collected affidavits, board-of-elections records, and other documentary evidence and under the law they are entitled access to the courts to present their grievances. Far from undermining American democracy, this demonstrates its strengths—and sets it apart from the likes of Venezuela, where elections are stolen with impunity.
Venezuela’s practice of electronic election theft began with the 2004 recall referendum. It was riddled with irregularities. But Venezuelans were denied requests for a statistically sound audit while the Carter Center and former President Jimmy Carter, the Organization of American States, and the Bush State Department rushed to endorse the lack of transparency. It is a record worth reviewing.
The Chávez regime used an electronic voting system run by a company called Smartmatic. Computer experts allege that its software is the same used by Dominion Voting Systems in 28 states, including Georgia, earlier this month.
The companies insist they are rivals. But since any voting software can be manipulated, whether there are links between the two wouldn’t seem to be the crux of the matter.
The important distinction is the decentralized architecture around a U.S. election and the legal paths that challengers enjoy in U.S. courts.
Chávez had already rewritten the constitution and fired 18,000 petroleum-industry workers in retribution for a strike at national oil-monopoly PdVSA when the recall vote was held. The idea that foreign observers were on hand to ensure fairness was a joke. The European Commission didn’t send an observer mission because, it said, it had “not been possible to secure” the conditions “to carry out an observation in line with the [European] Union’s standard methodology.”
That was a polite way of saying that the police state made honest observation impossible. No matter, the Carter Center signed up. Its main role turned out to be blessing a dubious result and the dictatorship’s wall of secrecy in assessing what happened.
On the day of the referendum, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2004, Venezuelans turned out in big numbers, confident that they could rid themselves of the antidemocratic strongman through the democratic process. An exit poll by the American polling company Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates found that Chávez lost his bid to stay in power by 59% to 41%.
Yet, as I reported on Aug. 20, “at three o’clock on Monday morning two members of the National Electoral Council (CNE) who are politically opposed to Chávez announced that they had been shut out of the audit process and warned the public that the established protocol had been violated. Some 50 minutes later pro-Chávez CNE member Francisco Carrasquero emerged alone to proclaim Chávez the winner.”
The Carter Center went along with the announcement, as did the OAS, claiming that a “quick count” confirmed it. But as I reported, the quick count was merely a “look at the tally sheets spat out by a sample of voting machines.” The useful foreigners, I had learned, had not been “allowed to check this against ballots the machines issued to voters as confirmation that their votes were properly registered.” Three days later the Bush State Department caved in to Mr. Carter’s insistence that his friend Hugo had won. It announced “the people of Venezuela have spoken.”
Venezuelans begged for justice. Enrique ter Horst, a Venezuelan and former U.N. deputy high commissioner of human rights, wrote at the time about his concerns in the International Herald Tribune: “The papers the new machines produced . . . were not added up and compared with the final numbers these machines produce at the end of the voting process, as the voting-machine manufacturer had suggested.”
Venezuelans never got their day in court, but Americans still get theirs. In the interest of securing the confidence of the electorate, court challenges ought to be allowed to play out.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
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