All of our attacks on democracy in Latin America have been predicated on that idea or on a version of that idea: Their leader is not a good leader, their democracy is not a real democracy or their elections are not real elections.
And twin of that justification is: the people are ignorant.
Just last week, this story was floated in our media:
Most electronic voting isn't secure, CIA expert saysBy Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers Greg Gordon, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Tue Mar 24, 3:53 pm ET
WASHINGTON — The CIA , which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela , Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering.
snip
Stigall, who's studied electronic systems in about three dozen countries, said that most countries' machines produced paper receipts that voters then dropped into boxes. However, even that doesn't prevent corruption, he said.
Turning to Venezuela , he said that Chavez controlled all of the country's voting equipment before he won a 2004 nationwide recall vote that had threatened to end his rule.
When Chavez won, Venezuelan mathematicians challenged results that showed him to be consistently strong in parts of the country where he had weak support. The mathematicians found "a very subtle algorithm" that appeared to adjust the vote in Chavez's favor, Stigall said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090324/pl_mcclatchy/3196949_1But, this story was debunked by CEPR years ago and confirmed by the Carter Center -- as stenographer Greg Gordon could have found had he bothered to do a simple search and had he not simply repeated what CIA told him:
Study Finds Economists' Allegations of Fraud in Venezuelan Referendum to Be GroundlessResults Concur With Carter Center's (September 17) Review of Audit Procedures
For Immediate Release: September 20, 2004
Contact: Debi Kar, 202- 387-5080
On September 3, economists Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and Roberto Rigobon of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, presented econometric results that the authors maintain are evidence of fraud in Venezuela's August 15 recall referendum. The paper was reported by four major international news outlets and was used to raise doubts about the validity of the referendum among U.S. legislators and policy-makers. It was also used to support claims of fraud by opposition leaders in Venezuela.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/-study-finds-economists-allegations-of-fraud-in-venezuelan-referendum-to-be-groundless/During the 2002 CIA-backed coup attempt, Ari Fleischer said from the podium that Chavez was repressive and that the Venezuelan people had decided to remove him -- the opposite of what was happening. Do you think the CIA is any less invested in getting him out in 2009 if they're running around spreading this discredited bs? :)
/oops