The presidential elections that took place on July 28 were, from the beginning, unfair and full of arbitrariness. On the one hand, the ruling party ordered the members of the board of the National Electoral Council (CNE), mostly members of the PSUV, to resign from their positions at a time when they had to analyze, among other matters, the formal request presented by the democratic opposition, so that the organization would facilitate the technological infrastructure for holding the opposition primary elections. Thus, leaving the organization headless for an unjustifiable period, they effectively eliminated such a possibility and made the realization of the event very complex as a citizen initiative with limited resources.
On the other hand, the executive branch arrives at the elections having “kidnapped” the opposition political parties through rulings from the Supreme Court of Justice that intervened in them, appointing people affected by Nicolas Maduro to head them. This, on the one hand, was a tough situation for the parties, and at the same time, it guaranteed the ruling forces a clever mechanism to defraud voters who, in the act of voting, could easily be confused when seeing the symbols of their parties. without being clear about who they were voting for.
Likewise, the democratic opposition candidate, María Corina Machado, was illegally disqualified, preventing her from participating in the election. Not content with that, the registration of Dr. Corina Yoris’s candidacy was in turn prevented, without even giving an explanation, legal or not, for her exclusion.
To make matters worse, the CNE established a complex series of requirements so that Venezuelans abroad could vote. Such was the level of demands, all unconstitutional and illegal, that of approximately five million Venezuelans abroad able to exercise their political rights by voting, less than seventy thousand managed to overcome the unusual regulatory checkpoints. It was clear that the function of the organization was not to favor the participation and exercise of the political rights of citizens, but to obstruct, hinder and impede it.
This is how you get to election day, when a massive vote took place. The problems began shortly after 7 pm, when the automated transmission of data from the electoral centers to the CNE totalization room was interrupted without an explanation. A technical report was never provided in this regard, even though the authorities announced an alleged “attack on the electoral communication system.” What was known from that hour were the exit polls, which gave a notable advantage to the opposition option, and this advantage coincided with what the polls in the last weeks of the campaign had indicated.
In parallel, reports begin of numerous witnesses at the polling stations who were denied a copy of the voting record, a clearly irregular fact that is beginning to form a pattern. In this state of affairs, in a few hours the president of the CNE announced Maduro’s victory, without publishing any data – and at the close of this article, this remains the case; try to see here-. The data presented by the president of the CNE, one of the most fervent pro-government supporters, as an “irreversible” trend indicated an advantage for Maduro by approximately 700,000 votes, at a time when almost 3,000,000 votes still needed to be counted. The fraud was not a matter of a few hours. It was built over several months.
Added to this is that the democratic opposition did receive a significant number of records from voting stations, and has subsequently collected others, currently having more than 80% of them. These show a percentage of approximately 70% of the votes in favor of Edmundo González. This sector has also taken the initiative to make the minutes public, and they can be consulted by any citizen by simply typing their identity card number on the page https://ganovzla.com/. The government has tried to block access to this resource, but the censorship has been evaded. All this constitutes a serious and massive violation of the political rights of Venezuelans, of the right to choose and to be elected, and reveals an electoral fraud of enormous magnitude, with the complicity of all State institutions.
For this reason, citizens, at the time of writing this note, are angrily demanding in the streets the restitution of their rights, while important sectors of the international community have expressed their request to the government of Nicolás Maduro to present the minutes that would supposedly endorse his victory. The Foreign Minister of Colombia, the presidents of Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and the United States, the Organization of American States, the European Union, among others, as well as observers of the process such as former presidents Ernesto Samper and Leonel Fernández, have expressed themselves in the same direction. Multilateral human rights protection organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and its Rapporteurship on Freedom of Expression and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have joined in, also calling for an end to the repression.
Venezuela is going through a serious political crisis and a new period of conflict in the midst of a complex humanitarian emergency. At this time, the temptation to intensify violence for political purposes through the generalized violation of the civil and political rights of the population may be present in those who have committed open fraud and have expressed this through the statements of Nicolás Maduro, Vladimir Padrino López, Tarek William Saab, Diosdado Cabello and Jorge Rodríguez. The international community must deepen its pronouncements and actions to favor the return to legality and the rule of law, demanding the transparency of the July 28 elections and the cessation of national repression. Venezuela is in a delicate but irreversible transition to democracy.