Are foreign observers coming and if not does that mean they disapprove of the way the elections are being held?
There are foreign “observers” coming to monitor the elections. For example, both the Organization of American States and CAPEL have delegations in Venezuela that will be observing the electoral process. However, they will not be observing the elections in the common sense of the word where they will be viewing all the steps, auditing the results, and ultimately verifying the accuracy of the official results. In elections of this nature it is not possible for observers to do that. The reason is quite straightforward. Rather than having just one vote to be monitored as in a presidential election or dozens of elections as in a congressional election there are literally thousands of different contests in these local elections. So the observers would have to have the staff to monitor each and every one of these thousands of elections. For that you would need tens of thousands of observers which is beyond the means of any of the international election observing agencies. For that reason the
