Venezuelan recall referendum, 2004
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The Venezuelan recall referendum of 15 August 2004 was a referendum to determine whether Hugo Chávez, then President of Venezuela, should be recalled from office. The recall referendum was announced on 8 June 2004 by the National Electoral Council (CNE) after the Venezuelan opposition succeeded in collecting the number of signatures required by the 1999 Constitution to effect a recall.
The result of the referendum was not to recall Chávez (58% no), but there have been allegations of fraud. In 2004, a report by election observers rejected the hypothesis of fraud, but statistical evaluations released in 2006 and 2011 disagreed. Former United States president Jimmy Carter and his Carter Center, all groups which had observed the referendum, and other analyses denied fraud, saying the referendum was performed in a free and fair manner, with Carter even accusing opposition-aligned sources of manipulating data.
The recall mechanism was introduced into Venezuelan law in 1999 under the new Constitution drafted by the National Constituent Assembly and sanctioned by the electorate in a referendum. Under its provisions, an elected official can be subjected to a recall referendum if a petition gathers signatures from 20% of the corresponding electorate. Thus, to order a presidential recall vote in 2004, 2.4 million signatures were needed - 20% of the national electorate.
The recall referendum is provided for in two articles of the 1999 Constitution:
In August 2003, about 3.2 million signatures were presented by Súmate, a Venezuelan volunteer civil association, founded in 2002. These signatures were rejected by the National Electoral Council (CNE) on the grounds that they had been collected prematurely; i.e., before the midpoint of the presidential term.
In September 2003, The Economist reported that the government used a "rapid reaction" squad to raid the offices of CNE (the government body overseeing the petition drive), where the petitions were stored.
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