A comment by Melanny Campos
Venezuelans who are committed to the change in Venezuela know that the President of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Tibisay Lucena, together with the government and its allies, have taken action to delay the call for a referendum process against Maduro.
To begin, if in the activation process referendum it was necessary to gather the signatures of 1% of the population, then these signatures should be validated and verified by the electoral body (CNE). More than half of the signatures collected were discarded due to, in the words of the CNE, “fraud”, and some of these allegations included signatures of political leaders who were filmed signing.
To start validations of these firms, the CNE apparently had flaws in their databases that changed voters home addresses, which resulted in many voters having to travel between states to validate their signatures. Conveniently, the government decided to make massive construction throughout the country, which hindered much the transportation of these voters.
The CNE had a lapse of three consecutive days for the verification of these validated signatures, as stipulated in the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela. This three-day period expired more than a month ago and still the CNE had been silent about it.
Moreover, some people reported on social networks that were called by the CNE to their CANTV phones (the operator CANTV is a government company) to survey them, ashking them questions about the government and the current socioeconomic situation. When the participants responded with dissatisfaction about the government, or mentioned the crisis that exists in Venezuela negatively, they cut the call. Shortly after being contacted, individuals would look on the CNE page and find that they were not on the voter list.
Melanny Campos lives in Caracas, Venezuela
