Tyranny's celebration

Exit polls Sunday indicated that Venezuelan President and Castro wannabe Hugo Chavez had been whupped in a recall election. Yet somehow he won his retention by 59-41%. How? Potentially fraud as this article indicates -- rigging electronic voting machines to switch votes after a certain result had been obtained:

Evidence of foul play has surfaced. In the town of Valle de la Pascua, where papers were counted at the initiative of those manning the voting center, the Yes vote had been cut by more than 75 percent, and the entire voting material was seized by the national guard shortly after the difference was established.

Three machines in a voting center in the state of Bolivar that has generally voted against Chávez all showed the same 133 votes for the Yes option, and higher numbers for the No option. Two other machines registered 126 Yes votes and much higher votes for the No. The opposition alleges that these machines, which can both send and receive information, were reprogrammed to start adjudicating all votes to the No option after a given number of Yes votes has been registered.

Although the Organization of American States and the Carter Center have called the election free and fair, their quick count justifying this statement was also based only on the numbers provided by the voting machines. The two organizations had brokered an agreement to examine, in the presence of government and opposition representatives, a sample of 150 voting points chosen at random. A comparison of the results printed out by these machines with the papers contained in the corresponding boxes was to be concluded this week. But the opposition now wants all machines and ballot boxes to be examined.

Thor Halvorssen is the founder and former executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (see my link to The FIRE at left) and a dual national with Venezuelan citizenship. During a demonstration Monday by Chavez opponents questioning the legitimacy of the voting results, 150 Chavez paramilitary men broke up the demonstration by attacking demonstrators with LIVE ammunition. His story (linked in title to this post) reveals a lot about the Chavez regime and what Chavez's "election" foreshadows for Venezuela in the next few years.