Venezuela's governor election

Si deseas leer la versión en español, haz click aquí.

I haven't been able to use steemit much the past few days, poor internet service combined with being busy as well, but it is time to talk about a relevant event in Venezuela: the governor's election.

After being postponed for over a year for no good reason (though, those who know better know it was due to the government knowing it'd have lost an election last year and the electoral council being partial to the government). At stake: 23 states.

To know what's going up with these elections I'll try to rewind the most important news from the past weeks:

• October 10, only 5 days away form the elections, the electoral council decides to relocate over 200 voting stations, this change affecting over 300 thousand voters in 16 states, targeting voting centers with high opposition voting turnout.

• October 6, the deadline for updating the electoral ballot is met without the Electoral Council doing the pertinent changes regarding opposition's participation, arguing the opposition had until August 16 to make changes to the ballot. For this I'll have to be a little more in-depth:

• • We use voting machines, the vote is electronic. The opposition launched several candidates per state, and each political party can support 1 candidate, the opposition celebrated a primary on September 10, and the winner became the candidate of the parties participating in the primary, meaning all would go on supporting the same candidate, after the primaries are done the electoral council has to update the ballot to reflect these changes (the ballot shows the face and the logo of the political party), however, the electoral council did NOT update the ballots saying the deadline was August 16. However, as clearly laid out by the LOPRE's(Organic law for electoral processes) article's 62 and 63, says that organizations have up to 10 days before the election day to make changes in their participation in the ballot, so the ballot ended unupdated and with the no longer running candidates, if people were to vote for them, offering support for their political party of choice, it'd result in a null vote. As the government chose all of its candidates in-party, without a primary, the only ones affected by this are opposition candidates and voters.
• • of course the opposition denounced it several times.

• September 28, The electoral council scraped 77 voting centers without even attempting to give an excuse or reason.

• September 27, In Táchira state, 17000 persons were removed from the electoral registry meaning they can't vote in the elections, this even though the registry's database can't be modified once elections are called. The electoral council said they'd investigate this and give answers before the elections... and the election already started.

Update: Spanish version released and did some changes for clarity's sake.

Update2: at this time, 7:30pm(GMT -4) the electoral council hasn't yet called for the closing of voting stations, by law they have to close at 6pm unless in a given voting table there are people left.

Voting centers have several voting tables (the amount varies by center) so only the table where there are people lined up are allowed to have their table opened.

Update3: at this time, 8:50(GMT -4) the electoral council hasn't yet called for the official closing of voting stations, a lot of them have, however, that doesn't mean all of them did, and if the population was already wary of the electoral council the feelings of suspicious will only increase with this if government's candidates win by a hair's width.