Incapable of stemming the opposing tide, the regime opted to manipulate the election results and make a mockery of the peoples will.
HAVANA TIMES – Venezuelans were the victims of a grotesque fraud in the presidential elections held on Sunday, July 28. The maneuvering – spearheaded by longtime Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro and his followers, and set in motion from the moment the polling centers opened – has been clumsy, flagrant and lacking in credibility. With no shame whatsoever, they’ve made a mockery of the popular will expressed in the ballot boxes, with one sole objective: maintaining the corrupt, arbitrary and repressive group they’re all part of.
No one with the most fundamental democratic convictions can accept a maneuver of this nature. It violates the most basic principles of democracy and the supreme basis of any government’s legitimacy: to have obtained power through the free exercise of voting, including respect for the results.
In Venezuela, the opposite has occurred. The regime completely failed in its attempts to intimidate the opposition leaders, inhibit candidates from running (especially Maria Corina Machado), and confuse the electorate. Neither these not other perverse methods kept the candidacy of Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia from the Democratic Unity Platform from sparking an unstoppable movement. Faced with a conclusive defeat, at the last-minute Maduro activated his extreme plan: to use his official control over the National Electoral Council to manipulate the voting results and construct a non-existent “reality.” In other words, as Maduro himself had put it, win “by hook or by crook.”
Just after midnight on Sunday, July 28, without releasing any detailed precinct voting results, the Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner with 51.2% of the votes, compared to 44.02% for Gonzalez, based on what they claimed were 80% of the polling places reporting. On Monday
