The international media seemed to have struggled a bit to spin the results of Venezuela’s National assembly elections in which the opposition has won a 2/3 majority of the seats. These elections did not have any US-approved “international observers” like the OAS – and Venezuela’s government has been depicted as a dictatorship, or very close to it, for well over a decade. How can the media rejoice at the opposition’s win while continuing to smear the electoral process that kept making the “wrong” side victorious in almost every national level election since 1998?

Francisco Toro wrote a blog post to help them out

“At a key moment last night, Defense Minister Padrino López had the legitimacy to press the president to accept the election results….”

The statement that Toro links to says absolutely nothing of the kind. It is banal praising of the electoral process that countless other officials including Maduro also praised after the votes were cast. The fact that Maduro signed a statement before the election agreeing to accept the results – which the opposition refused to sign – slips down the memory hole. Soon after signing that statement, right wing media jumped over remarks by Maduro that he would ”defend the revolution” in a “civic-military alliance” if the opposition won. I explained here that those remarks were distorted. Similar remarks by Chavez prior to the 2010 National Assembly elections were also distorted. In 2007, when the opposition won a referendum rejecting constitutional amendments, rumors also spread that the military somehow pressured the government to accept the defeat. When it suits their conspiracy theories, the military is not portrayed as being under the firm control of the government.

Today, another Caracas Chronicles blogger, Raul Stolk, had an op-ed published in the NYT – much to Toro’s delight.

Stolk wrote that that Chavistas “have proved again and again that they are democrats when they win a vote and authoritarians when they lose.”

Actually they’ve been depicted as despots regardless whether they’ve won or lost over the past 16 years as his op-ed helps illustrate.

Stolk falsely claimed that after the 2007 “referendum on radical constitutional reforms put forward by Mr. Chávez failed by a narrow 51-to-49 margin. Mr. Chávez ….over the next several years enacted every one of the rejected reforms, including a controversial amendment abolishing term limits on the presidency.”

As explained here the failed 2007 referendum proposed 69 amendments. A 2009 referendum – which voters approved – passed only five amendments – all related abolishing term limits for various elected offices not only the presidency. Stolk misleads readers that voters were somehow by-passed after the 2007 referendum defeat. They weren’t.

Stolk also complains that  “In the 2010 legislative elections, after a tight race in which the opposition and the ruling party scored virtually equal shares of the national popular vote, the opposition ended up with fewer seats than the government’s party thanks to gerrymandering by the national elections agency.”

The correlation between votes and seats is skewed in Venezuela’s National Assembly elections because it is not based on complete proportional representation – not because of gerrymandering. In this election, the opposition’s collation received 58% of the votes but won 67% of the seats. The government and its allies received 42% of the vote but only 33% of the seats. You won’t see complaints in the international media that gerrymandering was used to help the opposition. You also won’t see complaints in the international press that gerrymandering is rampant in Canadian or UK parliamentary elections where the skewing of votes relative to seats won in parliament is much greater.

UPDATE:

A friend of mine from the USA pointed out to me that when it comes to real gerrymandering – redrawing districts in outrageous ways to give one party an advantage – the US is the “world’s record-holder in blatant maximum-possible gerrymandering”. My friend noted that the term “gerrymandering” was coined in the US. The maps in this article show what highly gerrymandered Congressional districts in the USA tend to look like.

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