Electoral fraud in Venezuela is nothing new

 In the early hours of 16 August 2004, Francisco Carrasquero (then head of CNE) appeared on a  televised address in Venezuela to announce that Hugo Chavez had won a recall referendum on his rule. The results were: 59.1% of votes in favour of Chavez to remain as President and 40.6% against it. We were speechless. Chavez had won nearly 20% more votes than the opposing side, and yet, Carrasquero and Jorge Rodriguez (then CNE board member) refused to submit to meaningful scrutiny. No witnesses or electoral observers of any kind had been allowed in the tallying room at CNE’s headquarters upon closing polling stations. Audits that have been agreed in advance during protracted negotiations brokered by the OAS between Chavez and the opposition were not conducted. The Carter Center, which was acting as both a broker and electoral observer, failed to get Rodriguez to give an inch. In some of the polling stations were the audits did take place, Chavez lost with a margin almost identical to those reported by exit polls. After much protestation, an audit of polling stations selected randomly with software provided by the Carter Center was meant to be conducted a few days later. Again, Rodriguez imposed his own mechanism to select which polling stations were to be audited. By this point, the electoral material that was meant to be under constant guard by local and international electoral observers had been under Venezuela’s army control, well away from prying eyes. Peer reviewed statistical studies eventually showed that the result of the 2004 recall referendum announced by Carrasquero was, in fact, a statistical impossibility. The biggest electoral fraud Venezuela ever perpetrated in Venezuela was done by Hugo Chavez in 2004.

Since then, I have had countless discussions with people who insist -without evidence- that Chavez won legitimately. My argument, as explained to BBC World Service on the very morning of 16 August 2004, has not changed: without proper scrutiny, audits and witnesses corroborating that what was announced was a true representation of the vote, to take Carrasquero’s results as valid was an act of faith.  

Fast forward to 2024 and uninformed observers are led to believe that Nicolas Maduro just stole an election in Venezuela. For the first time. This is due to the largely ignorant reporters that have just arrived to the Venezuelan issue, but is hardly the case. There have been no fair, transparent, and subject to independent scrutiny elections in Venezuela since August 2004. Venezuela’s electoral system produces, to this day, whatever chavista authorities want. Jorge Rodriguez continues to exert absolute control over a system that was, as admitted by Smartmatic’s CEO, designed from the ground up according to Rodriguez’s specifications. The source code and technology used cannot be audited for “commercial reasons”, as admitted in a European electoral observation report. While Smartmatic is no longer running elections in Venezuela, that does not alter who’s in control. It’s always been an appendix of the regime.

Current head of CNE Elvis Amoroso appeared late on national TV on 28 July 2024 to announce that Maduro had won the elections with 51%. The results, according to Amoroso, were produced after tallying a little over 80% of the votes cast. Since that moment, chavismo has been scrambling to convince the world -without presenting a shred of proof- that Amoroso’s announcement is a true representation of the vote. Maduro basically wants to reenact what Chavez did in 2004. But Maduro is not Chavez, and apart from the usual thugs (Putin, Ortega, Xi, etc.), the world has moved on from the romanticism initially showered on the Bolivarian robolución. Venezuela was never a cause célèbre in international politics, but 8 million immigrants fleeing the place have made it so. Outside of war torn Syria and Ukraine, no country has seen a larger exodus of people in the 21st century. That is chavismo’s single most notorious achievement. Stealing elections is just par for the course.

There’s a few things in this new electoral fraud that have caught my attention. First, Amoroso announced results after allegedly tallying 80% of the vote. It was then announced that the CNE had been hacked -even though transmission of results takes place through phone lines (líneas muertas) that are not connected to the internet. The hack must have happened after having received roughly 80% of results. Initially, the opposition also managed to obtain copies of about 80% of the tallies, and quickly scanned and published results, which showed that Maduro had basically lost everywhere, even in Barinas, Chavez’s fiefdom and state of birth.
 
Since first announcement, the CNE has not published a single piece of proof backing up their result. The CNE’s website is down since 28 July, and continues offline as of this writing. My belief is that Maduro lost in roughly those 80% of voting stations that allowed public tallying to take place.

No independent monitor of web attacks has been able to corroborate the hack announced by Maduro’s regime.

According to the incomplete published count, Maduro got some 3.316.142 votes. These are, mainly, public employees, army, corrupt contractors and people whose livelihoods depend directly on chavismo. Otherwise, who can be insane enough to, still, vote for Maduro?

Enrique Marquez has been an absolute shocker. For decades he’s been perceived as a closeted chavista, a turncoat, someone two breaths away from selling his mother to advance his “political career”. But then, he organised a press conference and said that his electoral witness, who was with Amoroso inside CNE’s tallying room before Amoroso’s announcement, did not see any printing of results from any of the tallying that was taking place. Marquez went further and said that results announced did not come from tallying conducted under established protocol, but from Amoroso’s own office printer. It is a mystery why he has not been arrested yet, and it reminds of another episode in 2004, when Jimmy Carter said that Carter Center’s observers had witnessed the count only to be contradicted by then OAS Secretary Cesar Gaviria, who retorted saying that no witness had been allowed by Rodriguez into the tallying room.

In Venezuela the army executes elections, that is, days before a national electoral event the country is basically militarised, polling stations are taken over by the army days in advance. Once all electoral material, machines, etc., arrive in place everything is under the army’s control until conclusion of process, that is no one can take anything home without the army’s permission. Instructions were given that no tallies could leave polling stations, in clear violation of electoral rules stipulating that upon conclusion of vote count -which is public- witnesses with proper credentials have to be given a copy of the count for their records. Maduro has been rattled to his very core by the fact that, against specific orders to the contrary, the army let opposition witnesses take over 80% of the tallies, which ended up online shortly after the election.

Lula, Petro and AMLO are involved in a farcical mediation between Maduro and the opposition. Lula wants another election to take place, and then another presumably, until Maduro gets the result he wants. People have forgotten what Lula did for Chavez. I am therefore to be convinced that any of these actors have the 1) the will and 2) the pull to get Maduro to do anything against his wishes. Cristina Kirchner demanded Maduro to publish all tallies, she must have stopped receiving her per diem a long time ago...

In his recent derangement, Maduro published details of the secret Doha agreement with the U.S. administration. It shows that licenses granted to Haiti, Belize, Dominican Republic, Repsol, ENI. Trinidad, Shell, Maurel & Prom were requested by Maduro, rather than it being a lobbying effort of license recipients. It also shows that Alex Saab and Fat Leonard were, while not specifically referred to, part of negotiations.

Clause i)c) from Semana 2 shows agreement on inviting the Carter Center, and electoral observers from the EU and the UN to the presidential election. In a fantastic turn of events, the EU, unanimously, rejected Amoroso’s announcement and demanded publication of all electoral results. The Carter Center, in what can only be considered as a saving face manoeuvre given what it did in 2004, reported that Amoroso’s results could not be trusted, that the elections could not be considered democratic, and that there was no evidence of the alleged hack that took place. Then, the UN panel of electoral observers went further and said that elections in Venezuela lacked "basic transparency and integrity". But the CNE was not going to keep quiet about this, and it published, briefly on its Twitter account, a communiqué accusing the UN of disregarding its agreement with the chavista electoral authority, specifically the part about refraining from publishing anything about Venezuela’s elections, despite the final clause in the Doha agreement that establishes that none of what was agreed was binding!

In sum, as I am fond of saying, Maduro has been caught cagando y sin papel. He can no longer hide. He is a true son of Chavez, electoral fraud and all, though as usual, he got away with exactly what he wanted. He got Saab, he got his licenses and enough money to stay in power till his death. He was never going to respect adverse electoral results, and I don’t see him moving to Moscow anytime soon.

A surprising statement came from Tom Shannon, whom I met many years ago when he was “in charge” of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department. In a rather extraordinary feat of clarity, he said that there are two possible scenarios left for Venezuela: 1) Maduro goes full Ortega and shows the finger to the democratic world (something he has been doing since he took over in 2013), and 2) Venezuelans become so incensed by chavismo’s latest electoral fraud that Maduro is chased out of Miraflores a la Ceaușescu. It seems that not being in government has worked wonders on Shannon.

Another surprise of 28 July elections has been the amount of praise bestowed on Chavez. Commentators that became aware of Venezuela less than a month ago maintain that Chavez was good and Maduro is bad. Former chavistas, like the Venezuelan Goebbels Andres Izarra, claim that Maduro is, somehow, the evil version of chavismo. Defenders of CNE illegalities in the past, like Margarita Lopez Maya, now recourse to poetry and wrap themselves in the Venezuelan flag as newborn democrats. I won’t even address Eva Golinger’s opinions... Such bullshit goes unchallenged, of course, because there’s no depth, no historical perspective, no knowledge of the subject matter. Very few people have been keeping an eye, documenting and reporting on Venezuela since 1999, when chavismo came to power. Even less people have done so objectively when it comes to electoral matters, even though the elephant occupied the entire tallying room, hence no one could enter.

I still maintain that what will happen is what Maduro and his criminal clique decide to happen. One thing that seems clear to all is that change can only come from within. There’s nothing the international community can do to re-establish democracy in Venezuela. The Supreme Court's electoral branch has replaced electoral authorities and has been ordered by Maduro to "verify electoral results". This comes after a sentence years ago, by the very same Supreme Court electoral branch, ruling itself out from such tasks. Maria Corina and Edmundo are making all the appeals they can, of course, but the most important one, which is the one to the Venezuelan army, keeps falling of deaf ears. Democracy, freedom, rule of law, human, civil and political rights aren’t things that can interest members of a drug cartel raking billions every year.