Raising The Dead In Venezuela

There is an afterlife; I know because people are still voting long after they stop breathing. It says so in the Book of Rahm, chapter 12, verse 9, "And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes elections..." Venezuela does not fear a zombie apocalypse, but a zombie someday running for office.

MIAMI -- While U.S. and Latin American officials say that Venezuela’s political crisis should be solved through upcoming legislative elections, recent testimony before the U.S. Senate raised many questions: It said Venezuela’s voting registry includes the names of so many dead, many states have more registered voters than people.

In March 17 testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Russ Dallen, editor in chief of the Caracas-based Latin American Herald Tribune, said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government is overseeing a voting process that almost guarantees electoral fraud in the legislative elections tentatively scheduled for September.

In the CIA Factbook, Venezuela has about 28,870,000 people of whom 20 to 21 million (about 73%) are of voting age .... maybe.

In the US, it is estimated that in 2014 there where 245,700,000 eligible voters. This is 76% of our population of 322,580,000. So the numbers of eligible voters are not far off, but the registration of said voters might be. There is no measure of the percentage of eligible US voters casting ballots in the 2014 elections because 14 states have not bothered to submit this information, or refuse to, or can't.

Read on.

Venezuela’s voting registry has been manipulated by the Venezuelan and Cuban regimes since late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez contracted Cuban companies to run Venezuela’s passport and identification agencies.

In 2003, when Venezuela’s opposition launched a campaign for a referendum to revoke Chavez’s term, Venezuela had 11.9 million registered voters. Chavez managed to delay the vote for a year and a half, which gave him time to add more than two million voters, and by 2004 Venezuela had 14 million registered voters, Dallen said.

Angered by his defeat in a 2007 referendum to change the constitution and allow him to run indefinitely, Chavez once again ramped up registration of names, and added several million new registered voters. By the time of the 2013 elections, which the government-controlled National Electoral Commission awarded to Maduro by 1.5 percent of the vote, the registry had 18.9 million eligible voters.

“So, the voting registry increased by almost 60 percent in 10 years. Quite a population boom!,” Dallen said in his prepared testimony.

The miracle of Chicago lives on.