By DPA
Caracas : Venezuelan voters have rejected constitutional reforms that would have eliminated term limits for President Hugo Chavez, according to the first preliminary official results early Monday.
“It is an irreversible tendency,” Tibisay Lucenas, president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), said of the results of Sunday’s referendum.
The reforms would have paved the way for a socialist form of government and allowed the unlimited re-election of the president, among other key measures.
The controversial left-wing populist Chavez had won all previous elections and referendums since he assumed power in 1999 with at least 60 percent of the vote and was generally considered to have a broad popular base in a deeply divided country.
Chavez had claimed that the changes would return power to the Venezuelan people. His opponents, however, accused him of a power grab.
“We will accept the results whatever they are. Venezuelans have never voted so often as during these nine years of peaceful and democratic revolution,” Chavez said after casting his vote Sunday.
Earlier, the Spanish news agency EFE said the exit polls projected victory for the “yes” in the referendum.
PLM Consultores, Datanalisis and the Venezuelan Data Analysis Institute had carried out the surveys.
The results were leaked to the press even though Venezuelan law prohibits the publication of exit polls before the release of official results.
PLM Consultores said that 54 percent of the public had voted ‘yes’ to 46 percent ‘no’, Datanalisis gave 56 percent to the ‘yes’ option and 44 percent to the ‘no’ choice, and IVAD said that 53 percent of the votes had been cast for ‘yes’.
The results were delayed earlier because voter turnout was so high that some stations remained open after closing time.
Lucenas saod the referendum would allow Venezuela to give “a lesson on democracy to the whole world,” adding that there had only been “four or five” isolated incidents at polling places.
Some 16 million Venezuelans were eligible to go to the polls Sunday and cast their ballot for or against the overhaul proposed by President Hugo Chavez to modify 69 of the 350 articles of Venezuela’s 1999 constitution.
The changes Venezuelans were asked to approve also included mandating a 36-hour work-week and creating new types of property alongside the existing categories of private and public.
Another amendment would have given the government the right to suspend due process and press freedom during a state of emergency.