Author Archives: Francisco Toro

Nov
17
2010
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Francisco Toro
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El Encantado Humboldt

By Francisco Toro

There’s a particular perversity to the story of El Encantado Humboldt – the large, nearly finished housing development in Caracas chavismo decided to expropriate last week. More than 1,500 apartment owners now find themselves in legal limbo and very much at risk of losing their just-purchased homes as the government deliberates on whether other families “need them more”. At a mediation session earlier this week called by the consumer protection agency Indepabis to address the dispute, only pro-expropriations community groups were allowed to participate, with the owners’ association physically barred from the event.

Once again, the government finds itself in the odd position of acting forcefully to protect people of outrages that the alleged victims do not recognize. For instance, pro-government community groups allege that the buildings were not built to code, a pretext the owners would have contested had they been included in the discussion. And chavista officials alleged that the developer acted abusively and coercively in dealing with buyers – another allegation roundly refuted by the vast majority of Encantado Humboldt buyers. In effect, the government’s claim to the mantle of defender of the downtrodden is undermined by nothing so much as the supposedly downtrodden’s actual views. What El Encantado Humboldt’s owners do know is that the measure to expropriate the development has slammed the breaks on all mortgage negotiations surrounding the development, and made it impossible to sign final ownership papers.

The expropriation of El Encantado Humboldt is perverse on a number of levels. For years, as Chávez rhetoric became increasingly radicalized, the government tried to assuage middle class fears saying they were only interested in Big Capital – pointing at the commanding heights of the economy (as though the oil industry hadn’t already been nationalized for a generation when they took over.)

Concerns that a process that starts out targeting big capital can very easily degenerate into a generalized assault on all private property were routinely dismissed as fear-mongering or denounced as “part of an orchestrated campaign to discredit the revolutionary government.” Only reactionary cranks could believe Chávez would want to take your apartment, right?

Turns out in revolutionary times, yesterday’s shrill paranoid fears have a way of turning into tomorrow’s headline with unsettling frequency. While the ownership structure in the housing development is not entirely clear, what this sordid little episode makes clear is that the government does very much intend to extend its reach into the housing sector. Within a year or two, it’s easy to see this kind of thing becoming routine, just the way things are now. And the one-time reassurance about how the government would never ever in a zillion years consider this sort of thing? Bien gracias.

What’s most alarming about this case, though, is the way it showcases, yet again, the government’s tin-ear for the role of incentives in policy-making.

It’s easy enough to see the chilling effect this kind of measure is likely to have on investment in the construction sector: with this precedent in the books, who’s going to want to risk (or lend) a substantial sum for private housing construction? Nobody, obviously.

The government doesn’t seem to grasp that Pottery Barn rules apply: You Break It, You Own It. Having sapped private enterprise of the confidence it takes to invest in the housing sector, the only entity left to step into the breach is the government. But, for the Nth time, the government’s plan seems to be to undermine a private solution to a problem without accepting any responsibility for adopting a public one in its place.

 
Sep
27
2010
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Francisco Toro
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The 48% Landslide

A woman votes on Sunday elections in Venezuela.

A woman votes on Sunday elections in Venezuela.

By Francisco Toro*

Venezuelan politics doesn’t make much sense at the best of times, and last night was not the best of time. An electoral system mandated by the Constitution to establish Proportional Representation in legislative election has given Chávez’s ruling United Socialist Party of Venzuela (PSUV) some 95 seats (60% of the National Assembly) on the back of just 48% of the National Popular Vote. The Opposition Alliance, meanwhile, despite nearly matching the government’s tally with 47% of the vote, was left languishing with just 62 out of the Assembly’s 165 seats.

A small dissident leftist party won 2 seats, with six more too close to call and still to be adjudicated.

While the Opposition did manage to hold the government below its stated goal of a 2/3rd Supermajority in the Assembly, the real story is that the government had a shot at it in what was, basically, 50-50 election. This was only possible through the use of a mass of biased rules that, taken together, demonstrate how easily the government can now bend the country’s institutions to suit its narrow, electoral purpose.

Of course, non-proportional congressional elections are not, in and of themselves, undemocratic. It’s well known that First Past The Post voting systems, like the ones used in the U.S. and other Western democracies, routinely produce disproportionate seat distributions.

This may strike you as fair or unfair, but it’s certainly not unconstitutional: the U.S. constitution never set out to establish proportional representation in Legislative Elections.

What’s remarkable about the Venezuelan case is that our Constitution quite explicitly enshrines Proportional Representation in Legislative Elections. This is not some holdover from the ancien-regime, it’s the Constitution President Chávez championed in 1999 that contains this clause.

And, indeed, the Venezuelan voting system includes elaborate safeguards to ensure proportional results. Chief among them is list voting. In effect, in congressional elections, Venezuelans vote twice: first in first-past-the-post constituencies, and then again in state-wide party lists.  List voting was designed to preserve proportionality in the overall results, counteracting the non-proportionality in First Past the Post voting.

The rub, of course, is that the National Elections Council – the body charged with organizing elections – is a fully controlled subsidiary of the Chávez movement. Through a mixture of gerrymandering and one subtle change to the List Voting rules, the Council managed to create a system that retains the appearance of proportional voting, while yielding entirely disproportional results.

Take, for example, the industrial state of Carabobo – the kind of Urban state the opposition needed to do well in. CNE divided Carabobo into 5 heavily gerrymandered districts that elect 7 members to the Assembly (since not all constituencies are single-member), with a further 3 members elected by statewide proportional list. Overall, then, the state elects 10 deputies.

Last night, in list voting, the opposition out performed the government by 54 to 46% in Carabobo state. But due to a heavily gerrymandered map, the opposition won just one First Past the Post seat, leaving the government with the other six district seats.

In a proportional system, list voting would step in to try to correct that distortion, awarding all three of the List seats to the opposition to bring the overall Seat Distribution to 6 for the government and 4 for the opposition: note that, in this case, the government would still get most of the seats in a state it had lost, thanks to gerrymandering.

But it gets worse: it’s at this point that that sneaky rule change I mentioned earlier comes in. The Elections Council lifted the link between list voting and circuit voting, making the List voting a stand-alone election run alongside the district voting. This seemingly innocuous change ensures that the government receives one of the three ”List seats” as well. Rather than adding proportionality to the system, List Voting now further skews the results away from it.

In Venezuela’s “proportional” election system,the government won 7 seats out of 10 in a state where it lost the vote by 54% to 46%

And so, in Venezuela’s “proportional” election system, the government won 7 seats out of 10 in a state where it lost the vote by 54% to 46%!

Repeated throughout the country’s 24 states, this gerrymandered map together with a non-proportional list voting system added up to a government landslide…on 48% of the vote.

Of course, in a functioning democracy, the opposition would have redress of some sort: access to a court able to put this flagrant violation of the constitution right, some means of enforcing the Electoral norms established – paradoxically – by their opponents. In Chávez-era Venezuela, though, with courts that are as committed to the power of the ruling party as our Elections Council is, there’s no such recourse is possible.

Amid this grim outlook, one reality remains: chavismo does still accept the need for electoral legitimacy, and the kinds of rules-based shennanigans that allowed Chavista elections officials to grant the government 60% of the seats on 48% of the vote only work in a complex congressional election. In a simpler, nationwide vote – such as the upcoming 2012 presidential election – that dog just won’t hunt. Which is why we can be sure that the government’s failure to clear the 50% mark last night will weigh heavily on chavista shoulders.

Francisco Toro is a Venezuelan journalist, political scientist and blogger.  He edits since 2002 Caracas Chronicles, a well-known blog about Venezuela.

 
Sep
15
2010
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Francisco Toro
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Ahead of Legislative Elections, Venezuela’s Student Movement Comes of Age

Estudiantes+venezolanos 11 Ahead of Legislative Elections, Venezuelas Student Movement Comes of Age By Francisco Toro

Back in 2007, Venezuela saw the rise of a boisterous student movement, as university students spilled out onto the streets in  protest over the government’s decision to shut down the most popular TV stations in the country. Three years later, the  student movement is no longer out on the streets; they’re far too busy with the phone banks for that stuff.

With less than two weeks to go before the crucial legislative elections, Venezuela’s student movement is coming of age. Far  from turning away from politics, students have quietly remade themselves into the backbone of a  sophisticated election-day ground game. And while the movement can’t hope to match the seemingly limitless  resources of a hyper-empowered petro-state, it’s already clear that, for the first time in the Chávez era, this election cycle the  opposition is not about to wave a white flag in the ground war before a shot is fired.

“Back in 2008, we even called our organization here ‘Estudiantes en la Calle’ – ‘Students out in the Street,’” says Dayana  Mendez, a 21-year-old journalism student active with the movement in Carabobo State. “This time, we’ve decided our role  has to be different: instead of protesting in the streets, we’re giving people reasons to vote, and the tools to defend their vote.”

Two organizations are leading the student charge: DefiendeTuVoto.com (DefendYourVote) and VotoJoven.com (YoungVote). As its name implies, DefiendeTuVoto.com focuses on recruiting and training witnesses both inside and outside polling stations to help prevent the kinds of irregularities that have marred previous elections. VotoJoven.com, meanwhile, is working to demystify Venezuela’s complex voting system and promote voting among young people - a key demographic, considering that Venezuelans under 30 make up 46% of the country’s registered voters.

Though officially non-partisan, the groups liaise closely with Venezuela’s opposition parties and with opposition-minded NGOs such as ESDATA.info. On the basis of careful statistical analysis of recent election results, ESDATA has identified the congressional districts most open to government abuse, pinpointing the specific polling stations where statistical anomalies suggest the vote has being rigged.

For example, if people in one polling station voted 85% for the government, but that polling station is surrounded by four others that voted 56%, 58%, 53% and 55% for the government, it seems likely some kind of electoral hanky-panky was at play. ESDATA’s analysis flags such anomalies, bringing them to the students’ attention. They are then charged with recruiting, training and supporting witnesses to go to the problem stations and watch them like hawks on election day, with a camera-enabled cell-phone in hand, of course.

In the past, allegations of vote rigging have concentrated in poorer, more pro-government areas: precisely the type of areas where many polling stations had no trained witnesses at all. With no one watching over their shoulders, pro-government poll workers could simply line up at the end of the day and vote in place of those who had “forgotten” to turn up. The results, in some cases, bordered on the comical, such as the one polling station in Apure State that had 100% turnout and 100% pro-government votes in the February 2009 referendum on a Constitutional amendment.

The problem, for the last several cycles, has been that witnesses have crowded around reliably opposition-minded areas – where they are least needed – leaving no one to watch the problem areas. “In election after election, we have had a dozen witnesses in every polling station in the [relatively affluent] East of Caracas, where the voting is like in Switzerland,” says one movement activist who asked not to be named, “but no witnesses at all in the barrios, where voting is more like in Iran.”

This year, the student movement is going all out to make sure this kind of situation doesn’t happen again. Along with a concerted drive to sign up, train and support witnesses, the movement is working aggressively to make sure they’re sent to voting centers with a history of irregularities when no one is there to watch. Other students are organizing roving squads to make sure that the areas directly outside polling stations are free of the kind of voter intimidation – or even vote-buying – that have also become standard features of Venezuelan elections.

With less than two weeks to go, the students are bullish. Though the decentralized nature of their movement makes national figures hard to come by, it’s clear that in much of the country, chavistas are going to have to deal with an unprecedented opposition ground game. Some areas where chavismo has traditionally been unencumbered by witnesses – like the pro-government South-side of Valencia – are nearly booked solid with student witnesses this time around, making the opposition competitive in areas long seen as wide open to government intimidation and abuse.

* Francisco Toro is a Venezuelan journalist, political scientist and blogger.  He edits since 2002 Caracas Chronicles, a well-known blog about Venezuela.