President's complaint: The CNE continues to hold elections without respecting the Constitution or the electoral laws # 27Nov

The National Electoral Council (CNE) continues to organize electoral processes without respecting the constitution or the electoral laws, Súmate assures, on the basis of a report prepared jointly with Andrés Bello Catholic University and several organizations grouped within the Frente Amplio Venezuela Libre, which contains an assessment of the most serious irregularities committed during the process to date.

The report describes the systematic non-compliance with the electoral guarantees established in Article 293 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (CRBV) and broadly developed in Article 4 of the Organic Law of Electoral Power (LOPE). ). where it is specified in detail that the CNE must guarantee electoral conditions "equal, reliable, impartial, transparent and effective …".

Below you will find a summary of the most significant violations of the current electoral process detailed in the above-mentioned preliminary report:

1. The CNE convened on 11 July 2018 the election of councilors for 9 December 2018, which should have taken place in December 2017. This election will take place one year after the expiry of the four-year constitutional period of these officials.
2. These elections of councilors should not be separated from those of mayors, which were made expressly on December 10 last, because the two authorities are part of the municipal public power and have the same period of four years.

Violations of the right to choose

3. The CNE has not published the preliminary electoral register within thirty days of the convening of the process, contrary to the provisions of the LOPRE.
4. The number of registration points and the updating of the electoral register activated by the CNE and the duration of the process have not allowed at least 2 million young people between the years 18 and 18 to register in the electoral register. .
5. Of the 32 consecutive days in which, in accordance with the electoral calendar, the special registration and update day was entered in the electoral register, the CNE had worked 22 consecutive days, of which only 16 days, since the points were not included in the electoral register. were not activated during the weekends.
6. The CNE has allowed the registration and update of points in only 38% of the country's parishes, in addition to not giving voters easy access and guarantees for registration.
7. The institutional campaign of the CNE concerning the special day of registration and updating in the electoral register was insufficient and imprecise because it did not provide the location of the points, because it mis-recorded the dates and the registration conditions for young people under 18 years old.

Violations of the right to be chosen

8. The CNE has twice amended the period of the application changes in the electoral calendar, which is legally scheduled to run until October 2, extending it from October 5 to October 6, 2018, and continuing until October 2, 2018. to 9th of October.
9. The CNE published the final nomination data more than 15 days late, according to the electoral calendar, and did not publish the preliminary applications in time.
10. The CNE has not allowed citizens who aspire to popular election positions to have municipal councilors present themselves on their own initiative, by not detailing the process in the instructions, nor by allowing mechanisms to validate their positions. support signatures.
11. The CNE has canceled more than 40 opposition political organizations in the last two years for not having been subjected to repeated illegal validation processes and for reasons not taken into account in the electoral regulations. With regard to this electoral process, he was not allowed to be appointed to organizations that did not participate in the presidential elections of May 2018.
12. The CNE, which allows substitutions of candidates up to ten days before the election of councilors, acknowledges that, for the elections held since 2017 (he brought this activity back to one day after the end of candidacies), he violated the right of political parties to replace candidates during the legal period.

Illegal and partial definition of constituencies

13. The CNE convened the elections of councilors without complying with the legal procedure for the definition of constituencies, which states that the National Assembly must approve the demographic projections of the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
14. The comparison of the constituencies of the election of the councilors of this year 2018 with those of 2013 shows that the CNE has modified the number of seats to be chosen and certain constituencies, thus modifying the demographic projection of the INE 2018.

Drilling with coercion and illegal advertising

15. In the pilot centers of the electoral exercise that took place on Sunday, November 11, 148 citizens were deployed to lead a citizen controller of this activity, observing the following:

• Presence of red dots within 200 meters of the voting center, observed in 74.5% of the centers.
• Use of the country card in the red dots (74.5%) and in the centers or voting tables (12.7%) to control the participation.
• Illegal electoral propaganda (out of campaign) and around polling stations in 78.2% of the centers.

In the observation made, it is obvious that the electoral exercise programmed by the CNE to "strengthen the confidence of voters in the electoral system" has become an act of political proselytism of the party in power, where the majority of the participation is produced by the constraint exercised by the motherland card in the red dot, under the complacent gaze of the Republic's plan and without the electoral body limiting these practices.

With the above-mentioned preliminary report, the goal is to expose citizens to the way in which democratic electoral freedoms and the way in which the CNE builds electoral processes tainted with irregularities at the call , affecting transparency and transparency, have been accelerated in Venezuela. the freedom that should govern democratic elections.