Venezuela’s electoral authority announced that incumbent President Nicolás Maduro won the country’s presidential race over opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia in the wee hours of 29 July 2024. Since then, the opposition movement has claimed fraud and protests have gripped the country.
In the first of several planned updates, Southern Pulse answers 10 key questions about the ongoing and fast-changing situation in Venezuela. Please follow us on Substack and LinkedIn to make sure you receive our latest content about Venezuela and the Latin America region at large.
Written on 31 July 2024 at 4:55 a.m. Venezuela time.
Did the elections go smoothly?
Relatively, yes. Voting was largely peaceful, with people lining up outside polling stations hours before they opened. In many voting centers, the army, local authorities and armed gangs called colectivos intimidated opposition voters and witnesses. One opposition witness was shot and killed. Despite these incidents — which have sadly become the norm after Venezuelan elections since the current regime took power in the early 2000s — the voting process was relatively smooth.
Who won?
Officially, incumbent President Nicolás Maduro. The overwhelming majority of Venezuelans, however, voted for a different person.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) — controlled by the Maduro regime — called the election for Maduro without providing any evidence. On the other hand, the opposition has shown voting tallies from over 70% of voting stations indicating its candidate Edmundo González Urrutia won about 6 million votes to Maduro’s 3 million — an emphatic victory.
Was there fraud?
Yes – the electoral authority made up the tally. It simply announced the total number of votes and refused to share its data, broken down by states, municipalities and voting stations. On the other hand, the opposition is openly sharing all the data it has — disaggregated by voting station — in an exercise of maximum transparency. Opposition leaders are quite pleased to share the scale of their victory.
How can we trust the opposition’s claims?
Each voting machine in Venezuela prints a receipt detailing the vote count, with a unique hash code. The receipts the opposition has been publishing on its transparency website all have this code. Additionally, each receipt is signed by voting station staff. In other words, credibly forging the receipts is next to impossible. Venezuela’s voting machines were purposefully designed for such transparency and ease of verification.
So the election was stolen. Is that news? I thought Venezuelan elections were always rigged.
This level of fraud is entirely unprecedented. The Venezuelan regime has historically been quite subtle and skilled in manipulating elections. Usually, the regime intimidates the opposition, bans its candidates, excludes the movement from national media coverage, and harasses voters to make sure that loyalists turn out in greater numbers on election day. This signaled the strength of a regime that enjoyed genuine, massive popularity in the early 2000s. However, the regime had stopped short of tampering with the vote count itself — until now.
What we saw on Sunday was completely different. For the first time in a presidential election, the regime has manipulated the vote count. It was not subtle, and it definitely did not show strength.
How has the international community responded?
In a nutshell, Maduro’s victory has been celebrated by the governments you’d expect: Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, etc. It’s worth highlighting a slightly ominous line in Russia’s congratulatory tweet, which read: “Remember [Maduro] that you will always be welcome on Russian soil.”
The opposition’s demand to fully disclose voting tallies has been supported by most Latin American countries, the EU, and the US, among others (which include, oddly enough, Elon Musk).
Are there going to be protests? Will they be violent?
Protests broke out on Monday and were largely peaceful. Opposition leaders are calling on their followers to march peacefully with their families. Inevitably, however, tensions have risen over the following days. There have been some clashes between protesters and security forces — including the colectivos — with deaths on both sides.
These clashes do not seem, however, to be part of the opposition’s plan. The opposition’s current strategy is to expose the extent of the fraud by ensuring full transparency of votes. They hope that by revealing these numbers, government officials will buckle under the pressure and call on Maduro to recognize the result.
How stable will Venezuela be in the next six months?
Not very. The new president is supposed to take office in January 2025, and it’s soon to tell who exactly that will be. The opposition will continue to contest the results for the foreseeable future, and the US presidential campaign may add some momentum to its claims later in the year.
While the regime has not shown any signs of cracking so far, it might have to endure months — not days — of pressure.
Is Maduro likely to fall?
The honest answer is that nobody knows. Publicly, he enjoys the steadfast support of the armed forces and his party. Privately, however, we know that many of them voted for the opposition. How long until this contradiction comes out into the open — if ever — is anyone’s guess.
Has anything similar happened before?
Yes — with the caveat that historical analogies must be taken with a (large) grain of salt. In 1957, a military dictator staged such a spectacular electoral fraud that it only revealed the depth of his unpopularity. The armed forces turned on him just five weeks after the election and handed power to a civilian junta. While the current military has repeatedly professed its loyalty to Maduro, we should check again in a few weeks.
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