Harry Hutton has taken a break from his normal diet of whimsy [1] to get all political about Venezuela and eVoting.
While I doubt that the voting machines were rigged, it’s certainly true that the way Hugo Chavez has handled the election count could be straight from a ‘how to screw up what should be a resounding victory’ textbook [2]. The combination of delayed recounting and not storing proper paper records is guaranteed to undermine confidence in the final result.
And as Harry says, the implications for another electoral battle between vicious ideological opponents in a country with a history of electoral fraud and growing use of hard-to-audit eVoting machines could be scary.
[1] The Diet of Whimsy was called in 1085 to adjudicate on which of the six claimants to the Papacy was genuinely ordained by God, and which were ordained merely by chancers and heretics. It was one of the only recorded uses of Trial By Novelty Sports, with each antipope in turn being knocked out (and subsequently burned alive) after failing at simple and slightly ludicrous tasks.
The most favoured candidate, Antipope Clement III, was eliminated after failing to move enough inflatable balls from place to place while tethered by a bungee cord. The eventual winner, Cardinal Desiderius, was ordained Pope Blessed Victor III in honour of his blessed victory – although sadly he died within a year of assuming the Papal throne.
The medieval church subsequently abandoned Trial By Novelty Sports on the grounds of insufficient humour and brutality, and burned its inventor – a Cardinal Jersson Fruhntiay – at the stake. While Cardinal Fruhntiay is largely forgotten, his name has lived on as a bizarre linguistic quirk.
[2] According to “reliable conservative sources” [3], this textbook was donated to Chavez by the Kerry campaign, as part of their conspiracy to spread socialist solidarity throughout the Americas, surrender to the socialist Islamofacists, and betray the countrymen of all concerned. I’m normally reluctant to lend credence to such rumours, but it does certainly appear that Kerry’s team are expert enough in the field that they no longer need textbooks.
[3] This phrase shares a common meaning with the phrase “dribbling lunatics and paid shrills”.