The White House said today that a 100 percent audit of the votes in Venezuela was “an important, prudent and necessary step.”
Now it is no surprise that the White House would be on the side of the opposition to the Chavistas, which has been the U.S. position even before the military coup that Washington supported in 2002.
The really ominous thing here is that for years the Obama administration has been smart enough not to overtly take sides in an internal struggle within Venezuela. That’s because the Obama team knows that this only helps discredit the opposition.
They know very well that their call for a 100 percent audit will, if it has any influence, make it less likely that the Venezuelan government would support such an audit. This statement will just add fuel to the fire of those who say that the normal election rules, which mandate an audit of 54 percent of the machines (matching the paper ballots), should be respected; and that it would be a violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty to give in to external pressure.
So why did the White House make this statement, which is also sure to greatly annoy the new government of Venezuela? The most obvious answer, unfortunately, is that they want to promote conflict within the country. That is not a good sign. In previous Venezuelan presidential elections, since the recall referendum of 2004, both Republican and Democratic administrations did not necessarily want conflict because these elections were very close to the U.S. national elections, and it is a general rule to avoid risks that might raise the price of oil before an election, and so they recognized the results. It would be a very bad turn indeed if they have changed their policy.
If the White House merely wanted to support a 100 percent audit, it could do so privately, even to both sides (the NYT reported today that President Maduro reached out to the Obama administration through Bill Richardson, looking to improve relations). The White House statement today shows once again that it is definitely not interested in improving relations. Nor is it interested in a 100 percent audit of the vote.
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is author of the book Failed: What the "Experts" Got Wrong About the Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy.
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