This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 24th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Elections in Venezuela aren't free.

That according to Maria Karina Machado, an activist in that country,

the nominally independent election commission backs the government.

President Hugo Chavez can force media outlets to become government propaganda machines

and now a very large minority of

Venezuelan voters believe their votes are not secret that the government may use

their votes against them. I spoke with Machado November 10th.

Well, in Venezuela, this process has been taking place in the last 10 years and it's been progressively. As I mentioned, I believe there are three main strategies that enable the government to have that control on the electoral process.

The first one is controlling the administrator of the process. In this case the Electoral Council

that by your constitution should be an independent power. It is controlled

because four out of five of the directors are totally

loyal to the government and have acted in that way.

They designed the process in terms of regulations,

in terms of the electoral lease, the registered auditing process

in ways that truly favor the government in the handling of the processes and so on.

The second strategy has to do with the propaganda and the electoral campaign.

Huge resources have been used and the President Chavez has been forcing the media

to broadcast information that favors the government's position.

Just to give you an example during the last campaign for the amendment to the Constitution last February.

during the 70-day campaign President Child was an average of 3.03 hours a day on TV and radio.

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