María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.
Thứ Sáu, 17 tháng 2, 2012
Venezuelans Clash Over Secrecy of Voter Names
The nation’s highest court on Tuesday ordered the opposition coalition that organized the primary to turn over to the government records containing the names of the more than three million people who participated. The voters overwhelmingly selected Henrique Capriles Radonski, a 39-year-old state governor, to take on Mr. Chávez in a general election scheduled for Oct. 7. But the organizers of the primary said they would resist the court order and had already burned almost all of the books that voters used to sign in at polling places, as they had publicly pledged to do to safeguard the voters’ anonymity. “We are protecting the identity of all the voters,” said Teresa Albanes, who was in charge of the primary operation for the opposition coalition, Democratic Unity. Speaking to reporters outside the Supreme Court building, she called the court’s order excessive, adding that the group’s intention to destroy the voter names was made public months earlier and was not opposed by the government electoral commission. Ramón José Medina, another Democratic Unity official, said in an interview that 99 percent of the sign-in books had been destroyed. He said that a small number were being preserved in cases where there were questions about the outcome of races, and that they were being hidden to keep them out of the hands of government officials. Also on Wednesday, Mr. Chávez made his first public comments since the primary, speaking during a National Assembly event that television and radio stations were required to broadcast. Mr. Chávez said that burning the records was suspicious and smacked of fascism and that by refusing to comply with the court order, the opposition leaders were creating a climate of destabilization in the country. “They are lying when they say that it is to protect the voters,” Mr. Chávez said. “There is no persecution here.” Mr. Chávez did not name Mr. Capriles, but he mocked the opposition and said that its candidate represented the bourgeoisie and American imperialists, adding that he would thrash the opposition in the October general election. The confrontation has its roots in a 2004 referendum in which the opposition unsuccessfully sought to remove Mr. Chávez from office. To get the referendum on the ballot, the opposition submitted to the election authorities more than three million signatures. A pro-Chávez legislator, Luis Tascón, posted the names online. The opposition says it became a blacklist used to identify Mr. Chávez’s opponents. Many people said they lost their jobs with government agencies or were cut off from assistance programs because their names appeared on the Tascón list, as it is known. It was in response to that experience that the opposition coalition said it would take steps to keep voters’ identities secret in Sunday’s primary, which was also used to choose candidates for coming governor and mayoral races. That included destroying the sign-in books, where voters put their names and identity numbers. Officials also said they would not use machines that kept a digital record of voters’ fingerprints and would not require voters to mark a finger with indelible ink, a common practice used to prevent people from voting more than once. At the same time, the coalition said it would keep records of the votes cast, separate from the names, in case there was a need for a recount. But after the election, a primary candidate for a mayoral race in the western state of Yaracuy asked the top court to stop the destruction of the documents. The court issued an order requiring the opposition coalition to turn over all records with voter names to the electoral commission. Mr. Medina, the Democratic Unity official, said the action was part of a government manipulation. “Evidently, what they wanted to do was make a second Tascón list,” Mr. Medina said. “And that is what would have happened if they had gotten their hands on the election rolls.”
