After
weeks of imperialist threats and opposition violence, the elections
for the Constituent Assembly (ANC) in Venezuela took place on July
30th. The result was a massive turnout of over 8 million voters,
around 41% of the electorate, which gave chavismo a much-needed shot
in the arm. The western media reacted by trying to dispute the number
and sticking even closer to the narrative being pushed by the
opposition and the US State Department. With the opposition
scrambling and US authorities bringing more sanctions and threats, it
is now chavismo that has the political initiative. The Constituent
Assembly will not solve everything by itself, but it is a tremendous
opportunity to push the Bolivarian Revolution forward.
Part
2 - What’s in a number?
The
ineffable Guardian, which went into propaganda overdrive in recent
days, simply let the US State Department set the tone to describe
Sunday’s events in Venezuela. Perhaps still in denial, the Guardian
had yet to report the total number of votes on Monday morning. A
second piece that revealed the 8M votes surrounded by all the
supposed controversy also shed some light on the disputed predictions
and the “well respected independent analysis”:
“An
exit poll based on surveys from 110 voting centers [note: out of a
total of 12.000] by New York investment bank Torino Capital and a
Venezuela public opinion company estimated that 3.6 million people
voted…”
It would be
interesting to know the sample size, the margin of error, which
voting centres were used and which baseline is being compared
against. Exit polls work by comparing against exit polls from a
previous election, or a model based on previous elections. Voters are
interviewed during a certain period of time, and numbers are compared
to similar ones in a previous election during the same time to
predict turnout (and also how the vote might swing, which is not
relevant in this case). Since exit polling has been forbidden in the
past in Venezuela, it really makes us wonder how these predictions
are made.
We also need
to point out that in this case not all voting centres are created
equal. Given that the opposition flat-out refused to participate,
turnout will have been much more suppressed in the opposition
strongholds, and even more so in the vicinity of violent opposition
barricades. An oversampling of these would inevitably skewer the
prediction, which is why the data needs to be scrutinised and
compared to the official results if it is to be taken seriously. The
opposition’s long track record of crying fraud and presenting
fabricated evidence (or none at all) also makes these claims very
hard to believe.
In any case,
we expect the media to uncritically parrot the opposition
“prediction” with the same bias that they uncritically parrot the
7.6M total for the opposition’s consultation.
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