By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Aug 21 2004 (IPS)

An audit carried out by the OAS and Carter Centre, which was completed Saturday, confirmed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s victory in the Aug. 15 recall referendum.

However, the opposition coalition’s refusal to recognise Chávez’s triumph makes reconciliation in this highly polarised South American country look like an increasingly remote possibility, said César Gaviria, secretary-general of the OAS (Organisation of American States), and Jennifer McCoy, spokeswoman for the U.S.-based Carter Centre.

“The results we have obtained with this audit are totally compatible with the results of the electoral council,” Gaviria said in a joint press conference offered by the international election observers.

The audit consisted of a vote-by-vote recount of the paper receipts that reflected the votes cast in 150 randomly chosen polling stations from around the country, which had a total of 400 touch-screen machines.

The machines produced a paper receipt of each vote, which voters then deposited into a ballot box. In the audit, local monitors, accompanied by international election observers, checked the results from the machines against the paper ballots to make sure there were no significant differences.

Ninety percent of voters used the new electronic polling system last Sunday.

The partial returns issued last Monday by the electoral council, based on 94 percent of the electronic votes cast, showed that 58.25 percent voted in favour of Chávez completing his term until January 2007, and 41.74 percent voted for his removal.

When the ballots from the most remote regions, where 900,000 Venezuelans voted manually, were added to the total Wednesday, the electoral council reported that the proportion who voted in favour of Chávez rose to 59.06 percent, against 40.94 percent for the opposition.

Of the manual ballots, 70 percent were for Chávez and 30 percent against.

The audit and the random selection of ballot boxes were proposed by Nobel Peace Prize-winner and former U.S. president (1977-1983) Jimmy Carter, after Súmate – the technical committee of the Democratic Coordinator opposition alliance, which gathered the signatures to trigger a recall referendum – alleged that fraud had been committed.

But after the electoral council accepted the audit, the Democratic Coordinator announced that it would not take part, arguing that it should be the one to set the conditions.

In the tense political climate, there were complaints because the ballot boxes, which had been sealed in the presence of both pro-government and opposition witnesses, were left in the hands of the armed forces, of which the president is commander-in-chief.

But McCoy and Edgardo Reis, the technical head of the OAS observers mission, explained that when the military authorities in each region were informed of which ballot boxes and machines had been chosen for the audit, the delegates of the respective teams of observers were already present.

McCoy also said the observers accompanied each machine and each ballot box transported by the local monitors, rode in the helicopters and vehicles that brought them to Caracas, slept right next to the boxes, and supervised each recount.

Domingo Mugica, president of Smartmatic, the company that sold Venezuela the voting machines, pointed out that each electronic ballot and paper receipt has its own 32-character alphanumeric code that is randomly assigned at the moment the vote is cast, which means auditors can verify that the votes in the machines correspond to the paper ballots.

McCoy underlined that the military did not know which boxes or machines would be audited until they were told by the monitors, and that to fix the vote, it would have been necessary to modify the content of each one of the 19,600 ballot boxes – a practically impossible task.

Mugica told reporters Thursday that such a difficult undertaking would have required huge technical skill, and would have taken around six months.

After the audit was completed, Gaviria reiterated what the international election observers had already stated on Monday: that they had no doubts that Chávez won fairly, and that the elections were clean.

McCoy said the observers hoped that with the results of the audit, the Venezuelan people would have faith in their electoral system.

Both observers also pointed out that the machines, before they were delivered to the voting stations, were also subjected to an audit in the presence of opposition and pro-government witnesses, as well as international observers, with “impeccable” results.

For months, the Democratic Coordinator expressed mistrust towards the National Electoral Council, because three of its five members are pro-government while only two belong to the opposition.

The opposition coalition repeated over and over that it would only accept the outcome of the referendum if it were endorsed by the OAS and Carter Centre missions.

But even after the observers backed the partial returns on Monday, the opposition alliance continued to cry fraud.

Jesús Méndez, the president of Democratic Action, the main opposition party, said “new evidence that we are gathering on this colossal fraud” must be analysed.

Enrique Mendoza, the main leader of the Democratic Coordinator, said the alliance would not take part in the audit, and said a committee of jurists and technical experts must be set up to collect evidence of the alleged fraud to present to governments in the region and the OAS itself to demand a review of the final verdict.

All of the governments that have spoken out publicly regarding the referendum have recognised Chávez’s victory, including the U.S. administration of George W. Bush, although the State Department said it was waiting for the completion of the audit to make a final statement.

On Friday, Chávez invited the opposition to accept the outcome of the referendum and engage in “constructive dialogue,” saying the coalition was “making a fool of itself internationally.”

Gaviria said the referendum was “the kind of peaceful, democratic and electoral solution that we sought for more than two years” to put an end to the political crisis and bring about reconciliation.

But he said that with the Democratic Coordinator’s refusal to accept the result, “much of what we were seeking will not be achieved.”

“In democracy it is very important for those who win to know how to win and for losers to know how to lose,” said the OAS leader.

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