Credit: Tomás Cuesta/AFP via Getty Images
By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Aug 19 2024 – There was an unusual sense of hope going into Venezuela’s 28 July presidential election. Democracy seemed on the horizon. María Corina Machado, the opposition’s rallying figure, had inspired a rare level of enthusiasm, promising millions of exiles they’d soon be able to return to a new Venezuela.
It seemed voting could bring change. And in a way, it did: the election proved the opposition could win despite an incredibly skewed playing field. But President Nicolás Maduro, in office since 2013, quickly declared himself the winner despite all evidence to the contrary, unleashing repression on the many who took to the streets in protest.
The situation is now at a standstill, and a Maduro-led regime lacking any legitimacy may use ever greater repression to stay in power. Many are deeply disappointed, but longtime Venezuelan activists advise patience alongside ongoing pressure. They knew the election could be the beginning of a much longer process. Now it’s a matter of finding the right mix of protest and international incentives to force negotiations that could lead to an eventual transition to democracy.
Election day
Although there were irregularities during the vote, they didn’t seem major. Most people in Venezuela, unlike Venezuelans abroad, seemed able to vote, and opposition witnesses were mostly allowed to visit polling stations and receive a copy of tallies produced by voting machines, as entitled to by law.
Fraud was hatched elsewhere, in the National Electoral Council’s (CNE) Totalisation Room, where vote tallies from 30,000 polling stations are processed and results calculated. The body responsible for overseeing elections is dominated by government loyalists.
The voting system is technically flawless: it operates on a closed circuit, making it almost impossible to hack, and contains multiple safeguards. This means that on election day, voting data flowed into the CNE as expected, and the count appeared to go smoothly until about 40 per cent of votes cast had been counted. That’s when the authorities apparently realised they were losing by an insurmountable margin and stopped transmitting data. Witnesses for the opposition were denied entry to the Totalisation Room. The CNE website froze and became inaccessible – and has remained so since. Without a shred of evidence, the government blamed ‘massive international hacking’, allegedly by opponents based in North Macedonia.
Throughout the afternoon, senior government officials issued media statements seemingly designed to prepare people for the announcement of a ruling party victory. They circulated exit polls showing Maduro with a lead of over 20 points, supposedly from a polling company that turned out to be fake. Meanwhile, exit polls conducted by opposition and independent pollsters gave González around 70 per cent.
Finally, around midnight, the CNE announced on national television that Maduro had won with 51.20 per cent against González’s 44.20 per cent. The vote totals were exact percentages to one decimal place, a near impossibility. It looked as though someone had decided on a percentage for each of the two main candidates and taken it from there. Without providing any disaggregated data, the CNE declared Maduro re-elected president.
The Carter Center, the only independent election observer allowed, left Venezuela on 29 July, saying the results were unverifiable and the election couldn’t be considered democratic. The opposition, civil society and the international community have since called on the government to produce detailed vote tallies, to no avail.
On 13 August, a UN panel of experts issued a preliminary report concluding that the CNE had failed to comply with ‘basic measures of transparency and integrity’.
What’s changed
But the story doesn’t end with massive fraud: some profound changes have taken place that suggest this is only the beginning.
For the first time in memory, no significant section of the opposition boycotted the election. Instead, the opposition held a primary vote that chose Machado as a unity candidate, with more than two million people taking part, despite threats from the authorities, censorship and physical attacks on candidates at rallies. But the results were immediately annulled by the government-aligned Supreme Court, which upheld an old disqualification against Machado, due to an unsubstantiated corruption conviction. The government then made the opposition jump through hoops to name a replacement.
Machado pulled off the seemingly impossible job of transferring her popularity to her successor, a softly spoken former diplomat who wasn’t on the political radar.
In addition to being united, the opposition developed a strategy, Plan 600K, to do everything it could to scrutinise the election. It recruited some 600,000 volunteers, organised in comanditos, groups of around 10 people each. By early July, the opposition claimed that more than 58,300 comanditos had been formed. On election day, they were present at polling stations across Venezuela.
They stayed throughout the day, and when the polls closed, took a copy of the tally sheet, photographed it, scanned the QR code and transferred the data, along with the paper documentation, to collection centres. Knowing what was coming, the opposition had worked with programmers to replicate an electoral computing centre so they could process the data and independently produce real figures down to polling station level.
This novel strategy caught the government off guard. By the time the CNE made its first announcements, the opposition had already counted 30 per cent of the ballots and knew it had won by a wide margin. The following day, opposition leaders held a press conference claiming to have counted over 70 per cent of the votes, giving González an unassailable lead. They opened up their database to the public, allowing investigative journalists and election experts to verify its accuracy.
The revelation of the crude nature of the government’s fraud brought a second major shift: the withdrawal of support from some states that customarily support Maduro. On election night, only four friendly authoritarian governments – China, Cuba, Iran and Russia – congratulated Maduro on his supposed re-election.
At the other end of the spectrum, several governments in the Americas, including Canada and the USA, refused to recognise the official results. Some, such as Argentina’s far-right libertarian president Javier Milei, did so for ideological reasons. But the rejections that carried the most weight came from Latin America’s democratic left, best represented by Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, who based his position on the unconditional defence of democracy. In response, the Venezuelan government expelled the diplomatic delegations of the seven Latin American countries that had questioned the election.
Somewhere in between, the European Union and three left-wing American governments – Brazil, Colombia and Mexico – said they’d recognise the results once the government produced the vote tallies and these were independently verified. Ahead of the election, Brazilian President Lula da Silva and Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on the government to ensure transparent elections and respect the results. They’re now in the best position to negotiate a transition behind the scenes. They’re the countries that receive most of Venezuela’s migrants, more of whom might leave if the crisis isn’t resolved.
What hasn’t changed
Before the election, Maduro warned of a ‘bloodbath’ if he didn’t win. He’s responded as expected, just as he did in the face of mass protests in 2014 and 2017 – with brutal repression that left at least 25 dead.
From the early hours of 29 July, hundreds took to the streets to protest against the implausible official results, and by the morning there were thousands across the country, mostly in densely populated working-class neighbourhoods, once government strongholds.
Maduro called the protests a ‘fascist outbreak’ and announced the construction of new prisons for detainees. Repression was often left in the hands of ‘armed collectives’ of pro-government paramilitaries who blocked marches, beat protesters and kidnapped opposition election observers. Lists of people wanted for allegedly inciting violence, including journalists and members of the opposition, were circulated on social media, and the authorities called for people to report those taking part in protests. In some Caracas neighbourhoods, pro-government groups tried to intimidate people by marking the houses of people perceived to be opposition supporters.
Security forces used pellets and teargas against protesters and arbitrarily arrested hundreds, charging them with terrorism or incitement to hatred. Over 2,400 people were arrested, according to official figures. The UN Human Rights Office found that most detainees weren’t allowed to choose their own lawyer or contact their families, and classed some of these cases as enforced disappearances.
But even when repression forced people back into their homes in fear for their lives, sporadic pot-banging protests have continued to erupt.
What must change
Whether the election marks the beginning of a democratic transition will depend on a combination of three factors, none of which is sufficient on its own: mass protest, international pressure and division and defection among the military.
Many Venezuelans saw the election as their last chance before giving up and joining the millions who’ve left. The exodus, the turnout, the results and the ensuing protests are all signs that the vast majority no longer support the government, and many actively oppose it.
So far, opposition leaders have refrained from calling people out onto the streets because, given the regime’s repressive response, more protests will inevitably mean further casualties. But without mass mobilisation, the regime could quickly regain control and opposition leaders could end up in prison. It remains to be seen how many will dare to take to the streets, for how long and how far the government will go to suppress them.
Maduro will only leave when he calculates that the cost of staying is higher than the cost of leaving, so any international negotiation should aim to lower his exit costs. This means the price of transition would likely be an unpalatable concession of immunity – and therefore impunity – for Maduro and other top officials.
But there’s only so much international pressure can do. Maduro has already shown he’s willing to take the hit of international isolation if that’s what it takes to stay in power. He has systematically reneged on all his international commitments, including the Barbados Agreement that paved the way for the election. What’s more, the states most willing to broker a deal have little leverage because Venezuela doesn’t depend on them, while the countries it relies on, China and Russia, have no incentive to promote democracy.
Two of the three elements in the equation have begun to shift: a clear majority has expressed its will at the ballot box and on the streets, and ideologically close former international allies have insisted that the will of the people must be respected. The third remains an unknown. Even under siege and internationally isolated, the regime could survive if it remains determined to tackle the crisis with violence, as it has done so far, and if security forces remain on its side. The fate of millions depends on what happens next.
Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
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