WASHINGTON – The Venezuelan opposition will boycott a proposed recount by election monitors in their country after meeting with members of the Organization of American States and President Carter’s organization yesterday.

The boycott could scuttle the perception advanced by human rights groups, the State Department, President Carter, and the OAS that Sunday’s referendum supporting President Chavez by a 58% to 42% margin was conducted in a free and fair manner. But the coalition of business groups, political parties, and labor unions opposing Mr. Chavez that organized the petition to hold Sunday’s referendum said the conditions leading up to the vote created an atmosphere of fear in some voters and allowed for the state’s election commission to rig voting machines, essentially placing a ceiling on how many votes against Mr. Chavez any given station would allow.

“Under these conditions we won’t accept this audit,” opposition politician Nelson Rampersad said yesterday at a press conference following a meeting between opposition leaders, President Carter, and the secretary-general of the OAS, Cesar Gaviria.

The opposition claimed that 47 voting machines tallied the exact same numbers of “yes” and “no” votes out of 20,000 voting tables used on Sunday. While opposition figures say this is evidence that some machines were rigged, OAS officials have said privately that this is not statistically significant. The Venezuelan election commission also released a statement yesterday that said the state would not overturn the vote it certified earlier this week that pronounced Mr. Chavez the winner.

The OAS said it was choosing 150 voting tables at random and counting the paper receipts of the votes cast electronically. Some press reports from Caracas said that some of those paper receipts were found cast aside in a river.

A spokesman for one of the groups that pushed for the vote, Sumate, told The New York Sun that the opposition believed not only that machines were rigged but that Mr. Chavez’s government took steps to prejudice the vote in the weeks running up to the vote. Sumate has received American funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.

“We are suspicious about the fraud,” the spokesman, Roberto Addul, said. “The election commission says the opposition had the opportunity to audit all the machines; we did not have the opportunity. They did not promote the secrecy of the vote, a week before the election the list of voters was changed to add foreign nationals.”

Last month, the head of Mr. Addul’s organization, Maria Corena Machato, was indicted for conspiracy for running a group that accepted money from a foreign government. The names of individuals who signed the initial petition calling for the referendum were published on an Internet site by a pro-Chavez legislator. American officials and members of the opposition say that many of these people have been denied government services and in some cases dismissed from government jobs because they signed the petition. An OAS official in Caracas told the Sun that he was aware of these reports, but to date no one has come forward to the organization claiming to be mistreated.

The reports of abuse are credible in Mr. Chavez’s Venezuela. Since being elected to office in 1999, a few years after he attempted and failed to seize power in a military coup, Mr. Chavez has passed some 49 laws by executive order; required his state’s broadcasters to air weekly rants in which he targets journalists and opposition politicians by name and at times has used force against demonstrators, such as after a failed coup attempt in 2002. His latest initiative is attempting to stack his country’s supreme court by expanding the number of justices from 20 to 32. When the petition campaign started, calling for a referendum, his government threw out the first petition claiming on a technicality that the names on the list were phony.

Mr. Addul said, and other Western diplomats confirmed, that Mr. Chavez granted citizenship to 2 million foreign nationals in the run-up to the vote, specifically after a second petition called for the referendum for Sunday. Mr. Addul also told the Sun that he doubted the election observers for the mission had enough monitors and access to do their job properly.

“The opposition are not very happy with the OAS and the Carter Center,” he said. “They arrived three days before the election, they were not involved in checking the machines and all the materials, they don’t have access to the transmission centers. The sample used for the machines do not apply the correct methodology.”

The requirements negotiated by the OAS and the Carter Center with Venezuela for the election monitors were so restrictive that the European Union did not even agree to observe the referendum. Those conditions at first limited the total number of monitors to 80, far fewer than most international organizations would send to a country the size of Venezuela. Eventually, the state relented and allowed 120 monitors to observe the vote.

The Chavez government also required that all monitors be accompanied by an official from the state’s election commission and said that Mr. Carter and Mr. Gaviria could not make public comments before the vote or contradict the assessment of the election commission. One American official told the Sun yesterday that the conditions were “the most restrictive requirements on election monitors in the last decade within the hemisphere.”

One of those monitors, Rep. Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York, said he traveled to polling sites with a member of the election commission, but this person did not accompany him into polling stations or choose the places he decided to visit. “I was free to drive around Venezuela; I stopped at many sites. No one knew where I was going. I was given complete access with out any hassle. I would be hassled more in the United States,” he said.

Mr. Meeks, like Mr. Carter and Human Rights Watch, believes the elections were free and fair. He even doubted the claims about the rigged election machines. “If you look at the results, it was not even close,” he said. “Are there some irregularities that are in all elections? Yes, even here. I found their machines were more reliable than the machines we use in Florida.”

An official from the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization that has supported some of the groups calling for the referendum against Mr. Chavez, said that it was necessary to have a swift certification of the referendum.

“It is too tense and too polarized to have a situation in which both sides are claiming victory and questioning the results. It’s necessary to have someone who can verify with an objective voice the elections,” the senior program officer for Latin America programs at the endowment, Christopher Sabatini, said.