Actually the 2004 referendum was actually stated to be fair. The OAS and the Carter Center who were the 2 main groups monitoring the elections at the time reported them to be free and fair.
"
After the Electoral Counsel stated Chavez won decisively, his opponents were quick to claim fraud, citing no evidence other than the internalized belief that it was impossible for Chávez to have such support. Such claims kept the recall from simmering into the second day, though they were eventually dismissed as the electoral observers, including Jimmy Carter and OAS leader Cesar Gaveria deemed the results to be fair. The fervently anti-Chávez bloggster and former NY Times reporter Francisco Toro put it as such on the day after the results.
But it looks very much to me like the government won fair and square. If it didn't, it'll come out in the paper-trail audit, which CNE's Jorge Rodriguez has already agreed to.
The audit option, which would manually recount the paper ballots that each individual put into the ballot box, thus dismissing any myth of computer fraud, was rejected the next day by the same opposition leaders who cried so hard to make sure they get one."
The Implications and Explanation of Venezuela's Recall Election. | the narcosphere
The Repeatedly Re-Elected Autocrat
The Carter Center clearly has a conflict of interest they were, in part, architects and quasi administrators for the Venezuelan government beginning in 1998. For the Carter Center to find impropriety in the voting would be admitting they were not effective in instilling democracy in that country. They should have stepped aside, but, they did not and their findings will be viewed through the lens of a party in interest in declaring the recall was proper. Indeed, there were many pre-recall voting problems and improper practices that the carter center knew about and acknowledged the result of which effected the vote itself.
The Carter Center:"since 1998, the Center has assisted Venezuelans in developing sound democratic practices. The Carter center appears to have had a conflict of interest. According to Jennifer L. McCoy who led the Carter Center delegation, “the government and the opposition had called on international actors to mediate their conflict, and the Tripartite International Working Group made up of the Carter Center, OAS, and UNDP was formed in July 2002. After an agreement was reached in May 2003, facilitated primarily by the OAS secretary general with support from the Carter Center, the government and opposition invited the OAS and
Carter Center to monitor the implementation of that agreement —namely the entire recall referendum process.”"~ Jennifer L. McCoy, Director, Americas Program, The Carter Center
The voting machines: "As Chavez was facing a recall, Venezuela's National Electoral Council, or CNE, announced plans to replace the nation's 6-year-old U.S.-made optical-scan voting machines. The five-member council, which is dominated by Chavez supporters, awarded the $91-million contract to Smartmatic, maker of the voting machine hardware, and Bizta, maker of the software that programmed the ballots and tabulated the votes. The companies are run jointly by two 30-year-old Venezuelan engineers, whose machines had never been used in an election.
As it turned out, the Venezuelan government owned 28 percent, or 3 million shares, of Bizta through investments in a venture capital fund. A top official from Venezuela's science ministry, who helped Chavez get elected in 1998, was also a member of Bizta's board of directors.
Two American election observers, Curtis Reed and Steve Henley, a Democratic candidate running for supervisor of elections in Hillsborough County, Florida, were invited to Venezuela by the opposition parties and sent a letter to Capitol Hill describing what they saw. Months before the election, they said, the government granted citizenship and voting rights to hundreds of thousands of foreigners while withdrawing voting rights from other citizens living abroad. The CNE also reassigned opposition voters to polling places hours away from their homes to discourage them from voting and replaced thousands of accredited poll workers who signed the recall petition with poll workers who supported Chavez. "
"Jennifer McCoy, who led the Carter Center delegation, said the Center documented the pre-election problems but that during the election they saw very little intimidation. "It was an amazingly calm day for having so many people standing in line for hours and hours," she said. "The fact that there was not more violence was absolutely amazing."
http://www.tfd.org.tw/docs/dj0201/Jennifer L. McCoy.pdf
International Peacekeeping and Human Rights Programs - Carter Center Activities by Country
E-Vote Rigging in Venezuela?
As far as your other sources: A blogger who is admittedly pro Chavez and a self proclaimed clearing house...How about some peer reviewed studies.
Ehhh whats the problem here?
Civil rights violations, intimidation practices and unlawful imprisonment to name a few issues.
