Maduro’s dirty playbook: How he’s rigging Venezuela’s election before votes are cast

Andres Oppenheimer

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro is hoping to steal the July 28 presidential elections by resorting to numerous dirty tricks, some of which are alarmingly ingenious. If his electoral ploys work, he may be able to rig the election long before election night, without the need to manipulate the vote count.

According to a recent Meganálisis poll, center-right opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urritia is leading the race with 68.4% of the vote, against 11.3% for Maduro. Other polls show a similarly huge advantage for the united opposition candidate.

But, Maduro, who according to the United States and more than 50 other democracies reelected himself fraudulently in 2018, is banking on old and new electoral schemes to reelect himself for a third six-year term.

Among his electoral tricks:

First, he has in effect prevented 4.5 million Venezuelan exiles from registering to vote abroad. That amounts to more than 21% of the total number of voters. Only Venezuelan exiles with permanent legal status in the countries where they live and are not seeking asylum will be allowed to vote. According to government figures, this means that only about 107,000 Venezuelans will be allowed to vote abroad.

Second, Maduro has banned the top opposition leaders from running for office. That includes María Corina Machado, who won an opposition primary with more than 92% of the vote in October, and is Venezuela’s most popular opposition figure today.

A Machado-appointed substitute candidate, 80-year-old university professor Corina Yoris, was subsequently prevented from registering to run for office. Machado has since appointed Gonzalez Urrutia, 74, a retired diplomat, to run in her place.

Third, there is no press freedom in Venezuela. Machado had not been interviewed by any major Venezuelan television network in more than a year, she told me in a recent interview. She added that she is campaigning for Gonzalez Urrutia by car because all domestic airlines have been ordered to prohibit her from boarding flights.

“When I stay at a hotel, they send tax authorities with absurd excuses and close it down for one or two months,” Machado told me.

Fourth, the regime has arrested dozens of opposition activists to intimidate others into not campaigning for the united opposition ticket.

Fifth, there are irregularities in 86% of polling places, where an estimated 18.5% of Venezuelans are expected to vote, according to the Venezuelan Communications and Democracy Observatory, a non-government think tank.

In some polling places, there is a suspicious over-registration of voters compared to previous elections, the study’s main author Hector Briceño told me. In addition, many voters in opposition districts are finding that their voting places have been suddenly changed by the Maduro-controlled electoral authorities to far away locations, Briceño said.

Sixth, the Maduro dictatorship has banned key foreign observation missions from the Organization of American States and the European Union from visiting the country. Except for the Carter Center, most of the invited foreign observers will be delegations from Maduro dictatorship allied countries.

Seventh, the ballots are designed to favor Maduro. They feature 13 pictures of a smiling Maduro prominently displayed in the top rows representing as many — often little known — political parties. By comparison, Gonzalez Urrutia’s picture appears only three times and far below, almost lost among many other minor candidates.

Eighth, several formerly well-known opposition parties have been “intervened” by the Maduro regime, but appear on the ballots under their original names. This may lead some voters to believe they are voting for an opposition candidate, when in fact they will be voting for a Maduro-planted one.

Ninth, many polling places are in government-run social subsidies centers where ruling party officials can sway people to vote for Maduro under the threat of losing their benefits, Briceño told me.

The list goes on, and I’m running out of space. But the bottom line is that Venezuela’s election is rigged from the outset. The only question is whether Venezuelans’ generalized rejection of Maduro will be massive enough to overcome the dictator’s catalog of dirty tricks.