283 - How to Steal an Election: The Big Lie
Maduro and Trump
There are innumerable ways crafty, duplicitous, confident political potentates can indulge in electoral contests without danger of losing the hard-edged power on which they construct their fortresses of calumny. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro counted Sunday's bitterly contested poll in a manner that secured him a third six-year term as the head of a nakedly authoritarian regime. His lackeys say that he won by 51 to 44 percent over Edmundo Gonzalez, the anti-Maduro, pro-democratic candidate of those brave enough to oppose Maduro.
A parallel gathering up of 73 percent of the paper printout totals produced by Venezuela's 30,000 voting machines instead showed that Gonzalez had at least 3.5 million more votes than Maduro. A separate representative sample of poll tallies suggested that Gonzalez won by 66 over 31 percent. An independent exit poll also gave Gonzalez a clear victory. There can be little doubt that Maduro and his apparatchiks stole the election.
Serious theft of the will of a voting populace takes place in stages. First, the ruling junta -- Maduro, his henchmen, and his security enforcers -- prevent credible candidates from standing against the dictator. In this case, Marina Corina Machado was ruled off the ballot. She, a formidable opponent, recruited Gonzalez, a 74-year former diplomat. Presumably, Maduro allowed Gonzalez's name to remain on the ballot because he seemed less threatening than Machado. Moreover, in electoral autocracies like Venezuela, it is essential that any electoral contest and result look authentic enough and not completely dismissed as improbable.
China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua (another tough edged American authoritarian example), and Bolivia have all drunk the Kool-Aid, congratulating Maduro on his striking electoral triumph. Much more jaundiced and savvy nearby left-wing regimes like those in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru all reacted skeptically, as did Costa Rica, the United States, the Europeans that matter, Uruguay and most fully democratic nations globally.
The U.S.-based Carter Center sent a technical mission of seventeen experts to Venezuela on Sunday election. It reported that the electoral authorities’ failure to announce disaggregated results from each polling station was “a serious breach of electoral principles.” The vote could not “be considered democratic.”
The election observation department of the Organization of American States said that the results reported were unreliable. “The events of election night confirm a coordinated strategy, unfolding over recent months, to undermine the integrity of the electoral process,” it said in understatement. “What happened shows, once again, that...the Venezuelan electoral system [is] at the service of the executive power, not citizens.”
Second, falsifying elections also depends on intimidating voters by making the actual process of voting challenging -- another Maduro tactic. In Zimbabwe, an African electoral autocracy under Presidents Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa, soldiers and ruling party thugs intimidated potential voters well before the actual poll, and then harassed them on the actual day. Additionally, in election after election, Mugabe instructed ethnic chiefs to tell their followers exactly where and how to place their Xs on the paper ballots. Maduro tried similar tactics.
Venezuela now uses machines that spew out a paper trail for verification. That makes it harder to manipulate the actual lever-pulling part of the voting act. But, as in Zambia in 2021, when a much reviled autocratic president was unexpectedly defeated by a genuine democrat, it is possible to thwart such falsification methods by stationing observers at every polling place and instructing them to retrieve the vote results as soon as each local place tallies up the results.
That is what Machado and her allies tried to do to prevent a distorted result on Sunday in Venezuela. But Maduro and his team kept observers away from the actual polling places and, unlike in previous contests, refused to release the paper backups. In other words, there exists absolutely no verification of the released 51 percent to 44 percent count. Nor can there be, for Machado's reconstructed parallel count shows a more likely result. (All opinion polls before Sunday showed Gonzalez with an insurmountable lead over Maduro.)
In many African elections over many decades before the Zambian turnover, electoral autocracies made sure that incumbent authoritarians won. This happened in at least six Zimbabwean electoral contests, in Kenya in 2007 and 2013; in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018, in Gabon, Cameroon, and Uganda repeatedly; in Malawi in 2019 (an electoral result that the country's supreme court revoked in 2020 and forced a new poll); and in negative places like Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan -- where all elections are farcical shams.
In Sunday's charade in Venezuela, it is highly likely that the only question that the national election commission that Maduro appointed and controlled had to ponder was which official numbers to choose. How many spurious votes should it announce for Maduro, how many for Gonzalez? The backroom discourse must have centered around how to present the fake result in a manner that might look tolerable enough to enable China and Russia to praise it.
Counting is a simple science. But if it leads to a popular, truly representative, result, a dictator might be pushed out of office and into an unruly street. That is what the protesters in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities have been trying to do since Sunday, but Maduro still has major repressive forces, guided by Cuban intelligence. The military remains on his side, as do the para-military militias that are loyal to him. The question that every dictator must ponder however is, but for how long?
Candidate Trump has not opined on Maduro, but by repeating now several times and refusing to withdraw early comments, he is doubling down on and approving autocracy and strong men. He also increasingly voices disdain for the electoral process. (At the Republican convention, however, he praised the fine place that Venezuela had become: “We will have our next Republican convention in Venezuela because it will be safe.”)
These were Trump’s choice words last week on elections: "Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years it will be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians." When asked by a friendly interviewer Tuesday to clarify, Trump reiterated: 'Don't worry about the future...After that [voting on Nov. 5] you don't have to worry about voting anymore...The country will be fixed and we won't need your vote anymore...."
Venezuela was once one of Latin America's most robust democracies. Then Capt. Hugo Chavez took advantage of tumbling oil prices and worker discontent to win an election in 1998. Systematically, afterwards, he dismantled popular rule, turning Venezuela into a personalist autocracy by 2013, when he died and Maduro, his vice president, succeeded to his authoritarian rule.
J. D. Vance once said that Trump would wind up being "America's Hitler." Certainly, Maduro, Hungary's Viktor Orban, and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega all seem exemplars that Trump will want to emulate; their tactics are ones he views as authentic and ideal. Like them, he appears to prefer the eradication of popular choice. He could favor all-out repression after a falsified electoral count. Maduro can give him lessons.
Maduro did not appreciate Venezuela's correct election result and altered it. Trump egged on his Proud Boy and other followers in January 2021 to overthrow a legitimate poll result. Free and fair electoral competitions must be protected from those, like Maduro and Trump, who merely use them for window-dressing.
Subscribers: Apologies for mistakenly numbering #s281 and 282. They are now numbered correctly.