Venezuela’s election was deeply flawed. Here’s how

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — It had already been clear for months that Venezuela’s presidential election Sunday, would not be free or fair, as the government jailed opposition leaders or disqualified them from running for office, and prevented millions of Venezuelans abroad from voting.

But as the day progressed, it became all the more evident just how flawed the country’s democratic process had become and why the victory claim by the country’s autocratic leader, President Nicolás Maduro, has provoked such fury.

Voter Intimidation

Across the country, citizens, local reporters and journalists for The New York Times observed instances of voter intimidation.

In the early morning, about 15 men in unmarked black jackets temporarily blocked access to one voting center in the capital, Caracas, a Times journalist observed. One volunteer vote monitor was punched.

The crowd eventually started demanding the right to vote and the long line started moving inside, more than an hour and a half after voting was officially supposed to start.

In the eastern city of Maturín, a woman was hit by a bullet when men on motorcycles drove by a line of people waiting to vote, according to a former lawmaker, María Gabriela Hernández, who was at the scene.

And in another polling place in the northern city of Cumaná, roughly 50 armed police officers and national guardsmen formed a long line outside, wearing helmets and body armor, in what appeared to be a show of power to anyone considering voting against the government.

In the nearby city of Carúpano, citizens and local journalists said that government security forces had tried to remove a vote monitor allied with the opposition and replace the person with a different monitor who had not been authorized by the country’s electoral authority.

Changing Some Voting Stations

About 17,000 Venezuelans saw their voting stations changed at the last minute, according to Carlos Medina, who helps direct the Venezuelan Electoral Observatory, an independent group.

That was the case for many voters in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city.

Sonia Gómez, 65, said she had checked the election council website Saturday to verify her polling station. But when she arrived Sunday, election workers told her she was registered somewhere else.

“They moved us older people because they know we don’t have that much energy,” she said, “but I’m going to look for someone to take me to vote.”

Five people in Cumaná said a new, unofficial voting station had been installed in a community center. A journalist working for the Times who tried to enter the site was stopped by government supporters.

Keeping Other Polling Places Open Late

Some stations stayed open beyond the scheduled end of the vote, giving members of Maduro’s party a chance to round up voters who had yet to cast their ballots.

“The opposition vote is more spontaneous; it arrives by its own means,” Medina said. “On the other hand, the pro-government vote has behind it a machinery that mobilizes the vote.

“So they left the centers open longer,” he added, “which allows the machinery to have more time to continue doing the work of searching and mobilizing the vote in favor of the ruling party.”

Withholding Paper Tallies

There are two vote counts in Venezuela, a digital tally received by the country’s election authority — which is led by an ally of Maduro — and a paper count printed by each voting machine at polling places.

The opposition invested heavily in an effort to have supporters present at each voting station to obtain a physical printout of the voting tally from every voting machine after the polls closed.

That access is required by Venezuelan election law, and the paper counts are typically the way that everyday citizens can verify that the digital count is correct.

But officials at some polling places refused to release the printouts to election monitors.

This was the case at one of the largest voting stations in Caracas, the Rafael Napoleon Baute school in Petare, where about 15,000 people were registered to vote.

In Maracaibo, local leaders said they had not been able to get the paper counts for all the voting centers in the region. At one school, Colegio Gonzaga, citizens protested outside, calling on the electoral officials to turn over the voting receipts.

Without all the paper counts, the country was left without a way to verify the result announced by the ruling party.

Partial election results from the paper counts, provided to the Times by a group of researchers associated with Venezuela’s main opposition alliance, supplied new evidence that calls the official result into question. Their figures suggest that the main opposition candidate, a retired diplomat named Edmundo González, actually beat Maduro by more than 30 percentage points.

Not Publishing a Full Vote Count

Shortly after midnight Monday, the country’s electoral authority announced that Maduro had received 51.2% of the vote, while the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González, had received 44.2%, with 80% of voting stations counted.

But the government did not release a full vote count, and its figures did not appear to match statistical estimates based on partial counts gathered by opposition poll watchers and other data that showed the president losing by a wide margin. As of Wednesday, the government had still not provided a full vote count.

The results were immediately called into question by the opposition and by the United States and other countries around the world, including several leftist Latin American governments.

“One of the main guarantees of our automated voting system is accountability, and accountability requires that the election results be published table by table to be able to verify the result,” Medina said. “Otherwise it is an act of faith, to believe in one number or another.”

If the country’s electoral authority does not reveal the results for every voting machine, he added, “it would be implicitly saying that it cannot support the numbers.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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