How to Steal an Election: Venezuela Edition
By: Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano
Observers assume that the Maduro regime will steal the upcoming presidential election. How difficult can it be?
“Managing elections is an art not so easily learned, and not so easily practiced,” British historian of Latin America Malcolm Deas wrote about 19th-century elections in Venezuela.
As the country prepares for presidential elections on 28 July 2024, few doubt that President Nicolás Maduro and the Partido Socialista Unido Venezolano (PSUV) party in power since 1999 have the required experience in this “art.” However, the second part of Deas’ statement remains true: stealing an election might not be as easy as observers tend to assume. In Venezuela, guaranteeing an electoral result that favors the incumbent involves a complex chain of actors running from the highest echelons of state power to rural communities.
The process can be divided into three key stages: designing the electoral contest before campaigning begins, supervising Election Day, and then handling the results. So what, exactly, would be needed to rig Venezuela’s upcoming presidential election? Who are the actors that participate in the process? What instruments does Chavismo have in its “election management” toolkit to ensure Maduro wins? And, what would the regime do if its strategy were to fail?
Before the election: co-opt the judiciary
To “manage” an election, the main actor that needs to be co-opted is the judiciary. A government that controls the courts can amend or break rules to its liking without fear of punishment. More importantly, control over the judiciary guarantees control over the institution in charge of organizing and running elections. In Venezuela’s case, this is the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE). The executive branch under Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) reformed the judiciary to its liking in 2004, packing the newly created Tribunal Superior de Justicia (TSJ) court with loyalists that, in turn, appointed further allies to the CNE’s board.
In tandem, the CNE and the TSJ have free rein to bar opposition candidates from running. Often alluding to opaque or dubious reasons, high-profile opposition candidates have been routinely disqualified from participating in Venezuelan elections. Most recently, María Corina Machado — an opposition leader who drew support from millions of Venezuelans in party primaries — was barred from the election. The Venezuelan regime has made generous use of this tool, ensuring that the most threatening candidates are sidelined before campaigning even begins.
Banning a candidate might not be enough to undermine opposition support, as leaders can be replaced. Venezuela had strong party loyalties during the 20th century, mainly to the social-democratic Acción Democrática (AD) and the Christian democratic party COPEI. To neutralize political parties rather than just individuals, the TSJ devised a new tool: “party intervention.” It works like this: a Chavista loyalist masquerading as an opposition politician — or an oppositionist co-opted by the regime popularly known as an alacrán (scorpion) — files a legal challenge to control a political opposition party. The TSJ invariably rules in favor of the Chavista, transferring all ownership of the party’s brand, assets, and rights to the alacrán. The main opposition parties of the past century — AD, COPEI, the newer Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and even the Venezuelan Communist Party — have had their ownership transferred to regime loyalists.
If Maduro’s government is unsure of its support going into the campaign, it has an effective way to suppress participation. The CNE is tasked with supervising the electoral registry, which, according to oppositionists, has failed to register about 4 million new voters for this year’s election and about 5 million potential voters living abroad.
Therefore, the Venezuelan regime can mold electoral competition to its liking before anyone has even cast a vote. Undesirable candidates can be disenfranchised, new voters can be excluded, and opposing political parties can be legally intervened. The TSJ has intervened in over a quarter of the 38 political parties running for the coming July election, and only three endorse opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia.
On election day: control the voting centers
Once the electoral contest has been drawn to the government’s liking, a new set of actors would be needed to “manage” election day.
Foremost among them is the Venezuelan army, which is tasked with executing a nationwide operation to supervise electoral proceedings. The army is deployed to every voting center in the country and has authority over each of them, as troops decide the centers’ opening and closing hours and who is allowed in. For the most part, the government can count on the unwavering loyalty of the military’s high-ranking officers. As the bedrock of Chavismo, the army has benefited from the administrations of Chávez and Maduro, who transformed the military into an administrative-entrepreneurial body in charge of running several government institutions and state-owned companies. In recent elections, the military has purposefully extended the opening hours of voting centers in loyalist strongholds, while closing them early in opposition neighborhoods. It has also vetoed access to opposition election observers, handing over entire centers to government loyalists.
The government not only exerts control through the army when voting happens, but also where. The CNE decides where to put voting centers and how large polling stations should be. In recent years, the executive has adopted a strategy of expanding the number of voting centers while reducing their size. The regime found that centers with a single polling station were easier to control than larger centers where greater numbers of oppositionists could gather. About 55% of Venezuela’s 16,000 voting centers have a single polling station. Chavismo has never lost in these single-table stations, electoral expert Eugenio G. Martínez told Southern Pulse. These centers, which are often placed in loyalist strongholds or government-funded council estates, concentrate the bulk of intimidation and harassment complaints by oppositionists.
Polling stations are run by volunteers the CNE randomly selects. Volunteers are notified via text message that they have been chosen for duty, and have the responsibility of ensuring that voting takes place in an orderly fashion without any tampering. The government, however, has a way of ensuring that such a crucial position is not left to luck. Volunteers have to undertake a training course to gain accreditation, and the CNE is often deliberately opaque on when and where this course takes place. This ensures that the majority of randomly selected volunteers are unable to gain credentials. On Election Day, the army has the right to handpick people tasked with overseeing the election if not enough volunteers arrive with proper credentials. For example, about 60% of overseers in the 2021 elections were not the randomly selected volunteers, Martínez said.
The government has not only designed the electoral competition to its liking before voting centers open, but it can also ensure that the majority of voting centers are directly run by loyalists through the army and the CNE.
After voting: amend the result as needed
Election “management” might be easily planned using these measures, but — as Deas argued — not so swiftly enforced. So, what would the incumbent do if enough opposition voters were to rally at the polls and defy government intimidation to cast their ballots? One option is to simply tamper with the vote count. Venezuela uses an electronic voting system, which is generally considered to be accurate by government and opposition experts alike. However, while the voting machines cannot be manipulated directly, there are opportunities to interfere with the counting process.
Take the 2017 elections to create a constitutional assembly, which paradoxically never drew up a constitution. The CNE manually counted data from some voting machines behind closed doors at its headquarters. While counting the votes is usually an automatic process whereby the machines send their results to the CNE via the internet, the army said it needed to download the data to USB drives and manually input it into the system because the connection had been lost. When the results were announced, government figures differed by one million votes from the machine counts.
This method, however, might be deemed too blatant. If the government loses the election, it has recourse to try a more elaborate solution: rendering the result meaningless by reengineering government institutions. In 2015, for example, the opposition gained a majority in Congress. The government’s response was to call for the aforementioned constitutional assembly, which was then granted all legislative powers by the TSJ. When an opposition leader won the mayorship of Caracas in 2008, the position’s powers were transferred to a newly created position of transformation minister appointed by the executive. In the event of an opposition victory on 28 July 2024, it wouldn’t be surprising if — for example — the government suddenly decided to turn the presidency into a symbolic, powerless office while giving executive powers to a newly created prime minister elected by a loyalist Congress.
What if everything fails?
If Maduro grows too worried about a possible election defeat, he could always cancel or postpone the election. With tensions on the rise with neighboring Guyana, Maduro could use a minor border scuffle — possibly involving drones because much of the terrain is inaccessible — to justify calling a state of emergency or suspending the election.
In the novel Reasons of State (1974) by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, the perennial president of a fictional South American republic in the 1910s confronts a damning editorial by the New York Times. “Who the hell told these people that there were to be any elections in this country?” the president asks his assistant. The latter softly concedes that it is stipulated in a constitutional article. “Well,” retorts the president, “the constitution also states that there will not be elections while we are at war, and I still haven’t signed a peace treaty with Hungary. To hold elections now would simply be unconstitutional!”
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