Súmate

[2] Súmate is a non-governmental organization (NGO) whose stated aim is to promote the free exercise of citizen's political rights, and the discussion of matters of public interest.

Súmate's espoused values are: Other projects are the consolidation of a national network of volunteers; analysis of voter registration; planning and execution of parallel vote counts to strengthen confidence in electoral processes; and educational programs.

These changes were made to the Constitution and electoral processes based on elections with an overwhelmingly support for Chávez[3] but unprecedented voter abstention[4]—a "poor showing"[5] with most staying away from the polls.

I had this unsettling feeling that I could not stay at home and watch the country get polarized and collapse.... We had to keep the electoral process but change the course, to give Venezuelans the chance to count ourselves, to dissipate tensions before they built up.

[11] An exit poll by US company Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) predicted that Chávez would lose by 20%, whereas the election results showed him to have won by 20%.

[13] Jimmy Carter said that Súmate "deliberately distributed this erroneous exit poll data in order to build up, not only the expectation of victory, but also to influence the people still standing in line".

[14] Following the recall vote, Súmate requested that Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University and Roberto Rigobón of MIT perform a statistical analysis analyzing how fraud could have occurred during the referendum.

They concluded that the vote samples audited by the government were not a random representation of all precincts and that opposition witnesses and international observers were not allowed near the computer hub on election day.

[18] After the referendum, members of Súmate were charged with treason and conspiracy, under Article 132 of the Venezuelan Penal Code,[19] accused of receiving financial support for their activities from the NED.

The report continues saying that in July 2005 a court in Caracas ordered a trial for its Vice President María Corina Machado, her colleague Alejandro Plaz, as well as Luis Enrique Palacios and Ricardo Estévez.

"[30] Machado said the government had stacked the odds against the opposition in the pre-election period, including "a climate of collective intimidation" due to the use of fingerprint-reading machines and an unaudited register of voters, and that if irregularities had been corrected, they could have impacted the final result.

"[30] Plaz is a Venezuelan engineer and management consultant, who holds three master's degrees (two from Stanford University), and was a Senior partner for McKinsey & Company in Latin America, before taking a leave of absence to co-found Súmate.