Under Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian Republic developed an excellent election system, which made cheating impossible without detection. Under Nicolás Maduro, the Bolivarian Republic just held a ludicrously fraudulent “election.”
One might conclude from this that the system President Chávez bequeathed was flawed. Such conclusion would be wrong. The fraud in the recent “election” has been blatant. The National Election Commission’s (CNE) own data, publicly available, showed that only 3.7 million people had voted by 5:30pm on election day. With the polls scheduled to close at 6pm, the government first ordered the CNE to stop reporting data and then held polls open to 7pm. The company that managed the electronic voting system, Smartmatic, almost immediately reported that the final counts had been tampered with.
In other words, the Chavista voting system worked! The government could not manipulate the results without being found out.
Of course, the fact that they have been found won’t make any difference. Venezuela is now a full-on dictatorship, ruled by Nicolás Maduro through a supine “constituent assembly” that is putatively charged with writing a new constitution but which has now assumed de jure authority over the state. (President Maduro holds the de facto power.) Another democracy has bitten the dust (at least for now) and Doug Muir has sadly won his argument that dictatorship is not dying.
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