Venezuela's Electoral Council, Fraud and the Doppelgänger

Tal Cual and Efecto Cocuyo wrote about one of the many cases in which the Electoral Council, a tool of Chavismo, wants to manipulate the elections in Venezuela one more time. In one sentence: a party with a name almost exactly the same as the opposition option for a key circuit appears in the ballot box just next to the opposition and the candidate's name is exactly the same as the opposition politician. 

If you vote for one of these, you vote for the opposition. If you vote for the other, you vote against the opposition

The opposition candidate is Ismael García, for the Mesa de la Unidad or MUD in Spanish. 

As Tal Cual managed to find out, the other Ismael García, for the MinUnidad, is a 28-year old guy working at a parking lot for a pitance of a salary and with absolutely no past political activity known.

I wanted to get a better sense of what the probabilities are, really, given all the Ismael Garcías in Venezuela. I looked at all the voters' names for 2011 (we have them because the government was forced to publish them) and I saw there were 123 people called Ismael García in the whole country, only 11 in Aragua, in that region (out of about 1200000 persons who can potentially run). The chances that two people with the same name appear in the ballot next to each other with parties that share the same acronyms are, for any practical reason, zero.

So, what happened was that the regime looked for one of the 11 persons with Ismael García's name in that region and paid him to do this. And the Electoral Council, a vulgar tool for Chavismo, agreed to accept this.

This is one of the many ways Chavismo will cheat. No wonder the only "international" observers the regime wants are of those South American countries that still have a big surplus with Venezuela.