18 de agosto 2024
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From an electoral perspective, fraud can be executed before, during, or immediately after an election The mechanisms are varied, and a lot has been written on the subject. With this in mind, looking at the events of July 28, we can conclude that in Venezuela fraud was perpetrated before and during the voting, but not afterwards, including the six hours that elapsed between the closure of the polling places and the first bulletin from the National Electoral Council (CNE). That wasn’t fraud, it was armed robbery.
Before the actual voting, there was fraud in the form of obstacles that prevented nearly all of the 8 million Venezuelans outside the country from exercising their right to vote. Only a tiny number were able to do so. There was fraud because the opposition candidate chosen by majority vote in the primary elections was kept from presenting herself as a candidate. Further, they imposed unthinkable levels of difficulty to hinder her participation in the campaign, including direct repression against her closest collaborators. There was also fraud in the sense of highly unequal access to the media and to financing.
On Election Day, the fraud took the form of trying to block the presence of opposition witnesses within the polling places to minimize controls over who voted and who wasn’t allowed, and over the emission of the voting tally sheets. The more opposition presence there is, the lesser the margin for fraud. However, afterwards, during the counting of the votes, there was no fraud in the sense of miscounting them, because they simply weren’t counted. While the initial Electoral Council statement alleged that they had tallied 80% of the precinct results, the results they gave weren’t a dressed-up count, but a crude invention.
Elvis Amoroso, president of the CNE, was probably the one who came up with the idea that 5,100,000 Venezuelans supported Nicolas Maduro and that he won with 51.2% of the votes, against 44.2% for the opposition. Those numbers didn’t come from any scrutiny of the actual ballots, but were invented. Committing fraud after elections such as these is practically impossible, given the massive participation – over 80% of the eligible voters, if we discount the four and a half million eligible voters residing outside the country that couldn’t vote. It would also have been impossible because of the huge difference in results – a gap of 30% between Edmundo Gonzales and Nicolas Maduro.
The majority of the voters who mobilized for change know this. Many of those who turned their backs on Maduro were former Chavista voters from the working-class neighborhoods. That’s why the violent response of the regime in their sorry state, determined to hold onto power at any cost. That’s why the harsh repression accompanied by an inflamed and incendiary rhetoric that speaks of terrorism to criminalize simple opinions and the rejection of Chavism. It’s a copy of the Nazi and Stalinist terminology, making every opponent, dissident, or anyone who dares to think differently the “enemy of the people” or “of the State” which, as such, deserves the harshest punishment.
In Venezuela “Operation Tun Tun” has begun, allowing massive imprisonments with express trials and numerous disappearances. Up until now, there’s talk of at least 24 dead and over 2,200 detained. Mimicking Nayib Bukele and his massive prison policy in El Salvador, Maduro is now threatening to build two maximum security prisons to punish any protests against the “Bolivarian revolution.” Maduro, who they bill as the “son of [Hugo] Chavez” said he’d explain things to Brazilian president Lula da Silva, Colombian president Gustavo Petro and Mexican President Andres Lopez Obrador, but so far he hasn’t done so. According to him, everything arose from a “situation very complicated to explain,” since “in the world there’s a lot of manipulation and lying.”
To Maduro and Diosdado Cabello, the world is lying in order to cheat the Chavista and Bolivarian-friendly people out of their legitimate triumph. That’s why Cabello says that the individual precinct tallies were never published before, nor will they be posted now. His mantra is that they, the opposition, “are gong to continue with their violence and we’re going to screw them.”
According to Andres Caleca, president of the CNE in 1999, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces have the responsibility of safeguarding the official tally printouts and all the material generated during the electoral process. Hence, he says, they staged a Coup d’etat when they ignored the popular will and the election of Gonzalez. Simultaneously, Maduro accused the opposition of setting in march a different Coup, a fascist and counterrevolutionary one, by refusing to recognize their defeat.
However, while the latter has produced data to support their claims and legitimize their position, publicly releasing over 80% of the official precinct tallies, the regime has dug in without showing a single statistic or tally sheet to back them up. The position of the Carter Center, the only independent organism that observed the election, has been conclusive, stating that the election: “didn’t comply with international standards,” nor “can it be considered democratic.” They even noted: “there’s no evidence of hacking” in the electoral system, despite the CNE denunciations.
I would have liked to be a little more optimistic about Venezuela and speak of a greater receptivity on the part of the regime to the offer of mediation from the presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, but up until now, it’s all been fruitless. They, too, have asked the Venezuelan government to display the precinct voting returns, a request that was flatly refused. As Tamara Taraciuk of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue said: “Things are going to get worse before they get better, because the regime’s instinctive reaction is (…) to dig in.” At present, Maria Corina Machado and the opposition coalition have called for a large popular demonstration in Caracas, the rest of Venezuela, and around the world on Saturday, August 17. It remains to be seen what the level of participation will be, and how the regime will respond.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by our Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
