The 2024 Presidential election in Venezuela, like most elections since the introduction of electronic voting 21 years ago, was heavily guarded and audited by citizens. Despite this oversight, incumbent president Nicolás Maduro stole the election. Due to the system's design and its built-in safeguards, the manipulation could not be concealed.
As reflected in the academic paper entitled “How Maduro Stole Venezuela's Vote,” by Javier Corrales and Dorothy Kronick: “Each voter cast a ballot on one of Venezuela’s electronic voting machines, inspected her individual ballot receipt (an actual piece of paper), and then dropped that receipt into a ballot box.
Later that evening, hundreds of thousands of people worked in concert to collect the results. They printed tally sheets from each voting machine. They counted millions of individual paper ballot receipts. They took photographs and videos documenting their work. And two days later, the González campaign published the results online. The campaign posted images of tally sheets that, taken together, accounted for more than 80 percent of ballots cast. González had won in a landslide. Shortly after midnight on election night, however, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) declared that Maduro had won. He remains in office.”
To steal an election in which voters had proof of the results, incumbent President Nicolás Maduro simply relied on his tight control of Venezuelan election authorities and the military to announce fake results and get away with it. It mattered little that the electronic voting system, in its various versions, had been extensively audited for years and reflected a victory for Edmundo Gonzalez. As Corrales and Kronick conclude: "Venezuela is a dictatorship in which people count votes democratically."
The electronic voting technology was implemented in 2004 for the Presidential Recall referendum, at a time when most Venezuelan voters supported then-President Hugo Chavez. “As the beneficiary of the biggest oil windfall in the history of the Americas, Chávez had no need to steal elections.” After winning that referendum, Chavez quickly realized that an efficient and transparent electronic voting system would provide the legitimacy he craved. Consequently, from 2004 until 2017, Venezuelan elections were closely monitored by the world's most prominent election observation missions, including the Carter Center, the Organization of American States, and the European Union. These institutions repeatedly validated the legitimacy of the results. Chavez simply had the votes.
“Unlike Chávez, his handpicked successor Maduro had little luck hanging on to popular support. Yet he chose not to uproot the transparent vote-counting system. Instead, he opted to buy election-loss insurance in the form of the armed forces’ loyalty. This loyalty is the base from which Maduro has safely defied the constitution and laws, not only by his reaction to the 2024 election but also by his behavior in previous elections, by the indiscriminate killing of thousands of innocent Venezuelans, and by political assassinations, among other crimes.”
As inauguration day approaches in Venezuela, widespread concerns about the legitimacy of the 2024 elections continue to intensify. There is wide consensus—from sworn adversaries like the United States and Argentina to former allies such as Colombia and Brazil—that Nicolás Maduro’s claim to the presidency on January 10 is illegitimate. The electronic voting system was designed to provide copies of tally reports to all political parties, serving as evidence capable of exposing electoral fraud if it were to occur. Citizens have diligently collected and safeguarded this proof. Despite this, Maduro has refused to accept defeat and relinquish power.
