Venezuelans have taken to the streets in massive numbers to protest what even the Jimmy Carter Center believes was a suspicious election.
The Carter Center thought that elections that brought Hugo Chavez to power and kept him in power were all on the up and up. Even after Chavez became wildly unpopular, the Carter Center kept certifying his elections as legitimate. When Chavez died in 2013, Jimmy Carter spoke glowingly of the socialist thug whose bullies intimidated voters and opposition candidates.
So when even the Carter Center questions the outcome of the Venezuelan elections, you know something is very fishy.
“The electoral authority’s failure to announce disaggregated results by polling station constitutes a serious breach of electoral principles,” the Carter Center said. The statement added that the election did not meet international standards and “cannot be considered democratic.”
The Carter Center was one of only a handful of international election monitors invited to oversee the election. Maduro must have thought that the milquetoast monitors would give him a pass as they have in the past.
The clashes in the streets of Caracas and other major cities have killed 16 people and resulted in the arrests of at least 750. Among those arrested was prominent opposition leader Freddy Superlano, whose party, "Popular Will," has been at war with the Maduro government for years.
“We are totally united,” said Robert Castellanos, 46, a chef who was an election monitor in his district. Castellanos said that the opposition presidential candidate, former diplomat Edmundo González, had received three times as many votes as the president. “This has been the biggest fraud in the history of Latin America.”
Whether that's true or not, at the very least, it's pretty blatant cheating by Maduro.
The opposition did some counting of its own. And it wasn't even close.
The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, released data on Tuesday night that she said showed Mr. González, the candidate she backed, winning the presidency in a landslide. The opposition’s updated results, using paper tallies observers collected from 81 percent of the nation’s voting machines, showed that Mr. Gonzalez had won 7.1 million votes, or 67 percent, versus 3.2 million, or 30 percent, for Mr. Maduro.
Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly and the head of Mr. Maduro’s campaign, also called for marches on Tuesday from traditional government strongholds to Miraflores, the presidential palace.
“We are going to Miraflores to defend our right to life, our right to freedom, and, above all, our right to choose and to defend the result of the election,” he said.
President Joe Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spoke by phone, and both agreed that the tally sheets, which the more than 30,000 electronic voting machines print after polls close and provide the most accurate count of votes, need to be released immediately. In past elections, Maduro released them after a few hours. But he has still refused to publish them and by now, any count from the government has lost all credibility.
Maria Corina Machado, the fiery opposition conservative activist, demanded the National Electoral Council release the tally sheets, asking, “Why don’t they publish them?”
Maduro is no doubt having a hard time changing enough of them to give him the victory.
González and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado told reporters they have obtained more than 70% of tally sheets from Sunday’s election, and they show González with more than double Maduro’s votes. Both called on people, some of whom protested in the hours after Maduro was declared winner, to remain calm and invited them to gather peacefully at 11 a.m. Tuesday to celebrate the results.
“I speak to you with the calmness of the truth,” González said as dozens of supporters cheered outside campaign headquarters in the capital, Caracas. “We have in our hands the tally sheets that demonstrate our categorical and mathematically irreversible victory.”
The protests will end when enough opposition leaders are jailed and enough protesters are gunned down in the streets. As long as one side has all the guns and the other side is virtually unarmed, the outcome of the "election" is not in doubt.
