EUGENIO MARTÍNEZ
EL UNIVERSAL

Hugo Chávez will hold the position as President of Venezuela for another six years, until February 2, 2013.

According to the National Electoral Council (CNE) preliminary official results, 61.62 percent of voters (6,191,652 people) endorsed Chávez' permanence in power.

This time, Chávez obtained 391,023 ballots more than on August 15, 2004 -during a recall vote intended to remove him from office. Back at that time, 5,800,629 people (59 percent of registered voters) voted the Venezuelan ruler.

On Sunday, Chávez became the Venezuelan President elected with the highest number of ballots in Venezuelan contemporary history. Concomitantly, this vote managed to stop non-participation -which saw a significant increase in every election since 1998, with the exception of the recall referendum.

According to the CNE preliminary reports, abstention in Sunday election was 26.4 percent. With the exception of the 1988 presidential vote, when Carlos Andrés Pérez was elected President of Venezuela, ever since the 1978 vote abstention in Venezuela has surpassed 25 percent.

Rosales won 38.12 percent support
Rosales' presidential bid was endorsed by 3,830,370 people (38.12 percent of registered voters). This figure is very similar to the results obtained during the recall vote in 2005, when the number of ballots to remove Chávez from power was 3,989,008 (40.6 percent of registered voters).

During the presidential recall referendum, there were -unconfirmed- claims that automated balloting machines put a ceiling on the number of votes intended to overthrow Chávez. On Sunday election, there were reports that in 36 percent of polling stations -located in areas linked to the opposition- automated voting machines "changed" valid votes for null votes.

However, CNE directors explained that such an irregularity should be attributed to human mistakes rather than a defective electoral system.

In short, the top electoral officials stressed that inadvertent use of polling machines by voters was the reason why voting machines were printing blank vote receipts. According to CNE, voters did not check the machines screens for their selection before pushing the Vote button on the touch-screen.

In the preliminary official results, CNE reported 135,734 invalid ballots. This number seems disproportionate for such a simple electoral process, particularly if one considers the fact that during the presidential recall vote CNE nullified only 25,994 ballots (0.26 percent).

However, even though the number of invalid votes may seem "suspiciously high," as some opposition experts suggested, it is actually below the official records of the presidential elections in 1998 and 2000.

In the 1998 vote, when Chávez was first elected as President, the number of invalid votes was 450,987, and during the 2000 vote to relegitimize public powers -following a constitutional reform-, null ballots were 348,465.

Chávez' MVR party won the largest amount of ballots in Sunday election. There were other four organizations supporting Chávez, namely Podemos (610,301 ballots), PPT (461,247 votes), the Communist Party of Venezuela (283,696) and MEP (75,000).

Regarding the number of votes the parties endorsing Rosales obtained, Un Nuevo Tiempo (Rosales' party) won 1,304,400 ballots, while his allied organization Primero Justicia obtained 1,184,759 votes.

Another party endorsing Rosales' presidential bid, Copei, won 214,514 ballots. The remaining political organizations supporting Rosales did not even gather 1 percent of ballots.

CNE  is expected Monday to unveil the final official results of the presidential vote.

Translated by Maryflor Suárez R.
msuarez@eluniversal.com