A Tale of Two Countries – from Prosperity to Slavery?

Venezuela tops the news with protests and riots across the country, when, after a six-hour delay in releasing the results, President Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in Sunday’s election with only 80% of the votes counted.

Some history from Wikipedia…

Since 1958, Venezuela has had a series of democratic governments. However, economic shocks in the 1980s led to several political crises… A collapse in confidence in the existing parties saw the 1998 election of former coup-involved career officer Hugo Chávez … the new government of Venezuela started several changes in the internal economy of the country, which resulted in a socioeconomic crisis… characterised by hyperinflation, escalating famine, disease, crime, and mortality, leading to massive emigration from the country.

The National Electoral Council (CNE) has been accused of being partial to the Maduro regime as witnesses from the opposing party were denied access to CNE headquarters as votes were counted and the CNE halted data being sent from local polling places to stop processing votes. Last year, the EU Parliament said Maduro was changing the CNE “to hamper the electoral process and quash any prospect of a return to democracy.”

Opposition leaders are claiming that their candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, received 70% of the vote against Maduro’s 30%. This reflects nationwide polling that showed the Venezuelan people are tired of Maduro’s running of the country, with hyper-inflation leading to poverty, famine and millions fleeing to other countries.

Edison Research published a nationwide exit poll showing González had won 65% of the vote, while Maduro won 31%. A respected local polling company predicted a 65% vote for Gonzalez and just under 14% for Maduro.

The Maduro government has been accused of widespread cheating in previous elections and this year they restricted the voting rights of the approximately 8 million Venezuelans living outside the country to allow less than 70,000.

Maduro’s government barred Venezuela’s most popular politician. María Corina Machado, from running, arrested her head of security and denied the opposition access to state media.

The Associated Press reported Maduro’s ruling party bused voters to polling places, opened some late and kept others open in efforts to manipulate the vote.

Maduro is facing drug trafficking and corruption charges in the US and is being investigated for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, the U.S. has “serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people… It’s critical that every vote be counted fairly and transparently, that election officials immediately share information with the opposition and independent observers without delay, and that the electoral authorities publish the detailed tabulation of votes.”

But Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s Foreign Ministry congratulated Maduro on his re-election.

The New York Times reports…

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

The paper counts are typically the way that everyday citizens can verify that the digital count is correct.

But this year, in some key stations, election officials refused to hand over the paper tallies to election monitors. This was the case at one of the largest voting stations in the capital, Caracas, the Rafael Napoleon Baute school in Petare, where about 15,000 people vote.

In Venezuela’s second largest city, Maracaibo, local leaders said they had not been able to get the paper counts for all the voting centers in their region…

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

In 2017, there were similar irregularities. Smartmatic, the company that provides the voting systems, claimed the Maduro government reported false turnout figures, announcing that the figure had been altered by at least one million votes. They stated, “We know, without any doubt, that the turnout of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was manipulated.”

The National Electoral Council claimed over eight million people voted, which is more than 40 percent of eligible voters. But Venezuelans said the estimate was unrealistic and pointed to the absence of lines or crowds at polling places. No major election international observers were present.

At the time, Smartmatic said that although Venezuela’s election process includes “a series of auditing systems” that are “impossible to circumvent,” no election monitors from the opposition were present to watch for evidence as it came in. Opposition parties had boycotted the vote, declining to participate in the election or review the returns on Sunday.

The absence of auditors, the company said, allowed for a manipulation of the turnout numbers.

Smartmatic said in its statement that it had provided voting services for the Venezuelan government since 2004.

“Even in moments of deep political conflict and division we have been satisfied that the voting process and the count has been completely accurate,” the company said. “It is, therefore, with the deepest regret that we have to report that the turnout figures on Sunday, 30 July, for the Constituent Assembly in Venezuela were tampered with.”

Vicente Bello, the opposition’s spokesman on voting issues, said the government had allowed many avenues for voter fraud. Voters were not asked to give proper identification, as in previous elections, and the government allowed people to cast ballots in any of three different locations, he said.

“The same person could vote three times or more,” he said.

So here you have Smartmatic itself, admitting that its machines are subject to tampering.

Wikipedia reports “Smartmatic “was founded in 2000 by Antonio Mugica, Alfredo José Anzola, and Roger Piñate and gained attention quickly after it was chosen to replace voting machines in Venezuela ahead of Hugo Chávez's 2004 reelection.

“Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country's elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Hugo Chávez as president in August 2004.^[16] Before the election, Smartmatic was part of a consortium that included a software company partly owned by a Venezuelan government agency.^[17]”

Dominion Voting Systems (DVS), the second-largest market share U.S. voting system, relies on Smartmatic technology as do others.

This begs the question “If the U.S. Secretary of State has concerns about the voting systems in Venezuela, how come the current administration insists the same systems are the safest and most secure in history?”

There is one nonpartisan organization that is working to ensure honest and accurate elections in the United States. United Sovereign Americans has developed a unique legal strategy to force the Supreme Court to demand that election officials across the country follow existing laws, or have their results declared invalid. They have filed two lawsuits in federal court and are soon to file three more. Their analysts have examined voter databases from 20 states and have discovered millions of errors that are opening the door for massive fraud in November.

Do the actions of Maduro seem oddly familiar to what we have been experiencing in the United States? Will we suffer the same fate as Venezuela, or will justice triumph in both countries? Is this “the Spring of Hope, or the Winter of Despair?”