Chavez Disputes Validity of Recall Vote Petitions
Holding up petitions that he said carried the names of dead people, minors and foreigners, President Hugo Chavez said Friday that he would appeal to Venezuela’s Supreme Court if election officials accepted them and held a recall vote against him.
Chavez’s comments fueled a growing dispute over the verification of 3.4 million signatures that opposition leaders said they had turned in to demand the recall.
He spoke hours after the Organization of American States and the Atlanta-based Carter Center cautioned Venezuelan election officials against using technicalities to reject the petitions.
Election officials were trying to decide what to do with thousands of petition sheets in which staff workers at sign-up centers filled out basic personal information for citizens -- and then had the citizens simply sign their names. The officials were split over whether that procedure violated election rules.
Chavez, whose six-year term ends in 2007, has said that opponents resorted to fraud to collect the signatures and that the forms had been filled out incorrectly.
Jorge Rodriguez, one of the National Elections Council’s five directors, said Friday that the verification process would be finished by Feb. 29.
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