Organizers say they'll appeal an electoral council ruling casting doubt on more than one million signatures for a recall vote on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

BY FRANCES ROBLES

CARACAS - The Venezuelan Supreme Court will likely make the call whether one million signatures demanding a recall referendum against President Hugo Chávez should stand, opposition activists said Wednesday.

The alternative: taking to the streets.

Protests that killed at least three people Tuesday night in Caracas alone -- hours after the National Electoral Council ruled against the one million signatures -- subsided Wednesday. Some 900 more people were injured -- 70 of them from gunshot wounds.

''We will appeal this to the ultimate consequences,'' said Alejandro Plaz, a board member of Súmate, the civic group that organized a petition drive seeking to revoke Chávez' mandate.

An alliance of groups that accuse Chávez of being a leftist autocrat held a four-day sign up campaign here late last year, seeking a quick end to the president's rule. But the elections council Tuesday rejected more than one million signatures -- out of the 3.4 million the opposition claims it presented.

But the question remains: How could so many signatures get tossed from a petition drive that was printed on numbered bank paper, supervised by the elections council, witnessed by both opposition and government representatives and observed by respected international groups?

The opposition's answer: The government made up a new rule to void signatures -- and applied it retroactively.

The government's response: Organizers cheated.

VAST DIVIDE

The question underscores the vast divide that separates Venezuelan politics and will undoubtedly add to the two-year crisis here.

Election board member Jorge Rodríguez said Wednesday night that the council was close to reaching an accord with the Democratic Coordinator, the umbrella organization of opposition groups.

At issue now is whether the opposition should accept the election council's ''repair'' plan, where the people whose signatures were preliminarily rejected would have to present themselves to reaffirm their signatures. The wide-ranging opposition is divided on whether to go forward and is in heated negotiations with the electoral council to establish terms for the appeals.

They argue that having volunteers help fill out the petitions -- resulting in forms with similar handwriting -- is not one of the rules for which a signature can be voided, as if it were a forgery or a photocopy.

Some leaders have already declared their resistance.

''We passed the test, but they are flunking us for a question that was not on the exam,'' former Gov. Henrique Salas Rmer said. This much is clear: The government is holding all the cards. Three of its supporters sit on the five-member electoral council, known as the CNE.

''The CNE has to be particularly prudent,'' said Deborah James, executive director of the Venezuela Information Office, a Venezuelan government lobbyist in Washington. ``It seems that if the opposition says it has enough support to revoke the president, then getting people to confirm their signatures should be a piece of cake.''

Samuel Moncada, head of the history department at the Central University of Venezuela, said it is impossible for Chávez to control the inner workings of the CNE because so much of its staff is held over from when the opposition controlled it.

Everyone from the doorman to the director, he said, owes his job to political patronage dating back decades.

''How is it possible that the CNE threw out so many signatures?'' asked Moncada, a government supporter. ``Because so much of what they turned in was garbage.''

ON BOTH SIDES

If a deal on how to handle the 1.1 million doubted signatures is not reached, it will probably end up at the Supreme Court, whose rulings have fallen on both sides of the political divide.

It would be the third time the opposition takes a petition drive to the nation's high courts. In November 2002, a petition seeking a nonbinding referendum was thrown out because of a dispute over the composition of the council. Another collected in February last year was scrapped because the court ruled it was held too early in the president's term.

Chávez's opponents say the latest moves show the president is in control of all the nation's institutions and that the election process is stacked against them.

'It will be very, very hard for the opposition to take this to the `repair' phase,'' said Michael Shifter, a senior analyst with the InterAmerican Dialogue in Washington. ``It will confirm the suspicions they have had for a long time: This is a sham.''