The Pre-Election Fraud of the 2012 Venezuelan Presidential Elections

If you you're in power and sure you have the majority of votes in your country, there is no need to rig elections. If you still do, your attempts could only backfire (Unless  of course when you're not satisfied with simply the majority and you need a 2/3 majority in congress to be able to rewrite the constitution, as has happened in the 2011 Nicaragua elections). Hugo Chávez strengthened the electoral system considerably by introducing voting machines, better laws and procedures. Never the less he still succeeded to rig the results of the intensively negotiated  2004 recall referendum. At the time the exit polls already showed that there was a massive electoral fraud going on.  Strong statistical proof according to two different methods (Benford's Law and Cluster Analysis) came available years later, when the National Electoral Council (CNE), foreign observers and OAS countries had already accepted the results.
Chávez rigged the 2010 Venezuelan parliamentary elections by  applying pre-election fraud referred to as gerrymandering as you can read below. Now facing a close finish with Henrique Capriles in the 2012 presidential elections, Chávez' rigging needs to be even more sophisticated than in 2004 and 2010. Check out the rest of this blogpost to find out about these methods.