Chavez Was Stopped from Rigging Venezuelan Referendum

Hugo Chavez hasn't lost an election in Venezuela...until last week. And it looks like he very much hoped to rig that one so he could win as well:

Most of Latin America's leaders breathed a sigh of relief earlier this week, after Venezuelan voters rejected President Hugo Chávez's constitutional amendment referendum. In private they were undoubtedly relieved that Chávez lost, and in public they expressed delight that he accepted defeat and did not steal the election. But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d'état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world.

What's funny about this is that I proposed this very scenerio as a possibility last week during the weekly radio interview I do every Tuesday, but only as a joke. I didn't really think that's how it might have gone down.