Venezuela Shows What an Actual Stolen Election Looks Like

Now that it seems like every single national election cycle in this country is suffused with accusations of fraud and malfeasance, it's worth looking to a country experiencing an actual stolen election to provide some sense of clarity.

Venezuelans went to the polls on Sunday, July 28. The incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, stood for a third consecutive six-year term against Edmundo González, the country's former ambassador to Argentina.

Early the following day, the government announced that with 80 percent of votes counted, Maduro had prevailed with 51.2 percent of the vote to González's 44.2 percent.

To Maduro's opponents, this seemed fishy: Polls taken earlier in July and collected by the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas showed Maduro polling between 12 percent and 25 percent, with González comfortably ahead, anywhere from 59 percent to 72 percent. An exit poll conducted by Edison Research at 100 polling locations corroborated this, finding that González outperformed Maduro by more than 2 to 1, capturing 65 percent to Maduro's 31 percent.

In other words, the official government results suggest that Maduro at least doubled, and potentially quadrupled, his support literally overnight—at a time when the country is still experiencing an economic crisis marked by dire poverty, hyperinflation, and millions of Venezuelans fleeing the country.

Others have echoed this skepticism. "There are clear signs that the election results announced by Venezuela's National Electoral Council do not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people as it was expressed at the ballot box on July 28," U.S. National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

"We have serious concerns that this result does not reflect the will and the votes of the Venezuelan people," a senior U.S. State Department official said after the results were announced. "We call for the immediate publication of detailed precinct-level polling to ensure accountability."

Private organizations sounded the alarm, as well.

"Venezuela's 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic," announced a July 30 statement from the Carter Center, which had observers in the country on election day. "The Carter Center cannot verify or corroborate the results of the election declared by the National Electoral Council (CNE), and the electoral authority's failure to announce disaggregated results by polling station constitutes a serious breach of electoral principles." The statement did allow that its observers "noted the desire of the Venezuelan people to participate in a democratic election process," but "their efforts were undermined by the CNE's complete lack of transparency in announcing the results."

There is mounting evidence of government chicanery to secure Maduro's reelection. For example, González was not even the opposition's first choice of candidate: Former lawmaker María Corina Machado received more than 90 percent of primary votes in October 2023, but Maduro's government banned her from seeking office for 15 years. After the election, six masked assailants broke into and ransacked Machado's campaign headquarters. Machado now says she is in hiding, "fearing for my life, my freedom, and that of my fellow countrymen from the dictatorship led by Nicolás Maduro."

And even though the government has not released precinct-level voting data, the opposition has taken up the task itself.

Venezuela uses electronic voting machines which print out a tally at the end of the day. The tallies are signed by poll workers and observers, and the political parties are allowed to take a copy. Each tally sheet also has a QR code for authentication.

Even before the election, the opposition enlisted thousands of volunteers to collect tallies for verification. The results of the independent count are published online. As of this writing, with more than 25,000 tallies counted—representing 83.5 percent of all ballots cast—González received 67 percent to Maduro's 30 percent.

Over the weekend, The Washington Post reported that it was able to independently verify "23,720 of the tally sheets that were scanned and posted online by the opposition," constituting 79 percent of the total vote tallies, and determined the exact same 67–30 split. "Even if Maduro won every vote on the remaining 21 percent, assuming a similar turnout," the Post determined, "he would still fall more than 1.5 million votes shy of González." The research firm AltaVista also conducted an exit poll using 5 percent of total vote tallies as collected by the opposition; the results similarly show González with 66.12 percent and Maduro with 31.39 percent.

There are more granular problems with the government's position, too. Daniel Di Martino, a Ph.D student in Economics and a graduate fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, observed on X that in the government's official results, the percentages all end in zeroes at the hundredths position—clean and convenient, but statistically, a near impossibility. "They picked the share of the vote and they multiplied it times the number of votes," Di Martino surmised.

The likelihood of the Venezuelan election "result" rounding exactly as they reported is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion).

The Venezuelan socialist regime is INCOMPETENT even at election fraud. They picked the share of the vote and they multiplied it times the number of votes. pic.twitter.com/O225QOAXe2

— Daniel Di Martino ???????????????? (@DanielDiMartino) July 31, 2024

In other words, it's increasingly evident that the Venezuelan government cooked the books to achieve its desired outcome. So it's useful to contrast the Venezuelan election with some rhetoric that U.S. politicians have used in recent years to claim massive vote fraud when the results simply don't go their way.

Most prominently, former President Donald Trump obstinately refused to believe that he had not won reelection in 2020, filing numerous fruitless lawsuits and cozying up to whoever pushed the most asinine theories. To this day, Trump still insists—against all evidence and common sense—that he was robbed of an electoral victory.

Many Republicans followed his lead, echoing his stolen-election allegations and submitting bills that would make voting more difficult. In the 2022 midterm elections, garnering Trump's endorsement seemed to hinge on whether you proclaimed that the previous election was stolen. In fact, policing voter fraud has long been a Republican hobbyhorse, even though actual instances of voter fraud are vanishingly few.

Republicans are not the only major U.S. political party to engage in election skepticism. Since losing the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly floated the idea that Trump's victory was not on the up-and-up. In November 2017, Clinton told Mother Jones that "there are lots of questions about its legitimacy," primarily as a result of a Russian disinformation campaign that "wasn't just influencing voters—it was determining the outcome." (To be clear, this campaign largely consisted of targeted Facebook ads and coverage on the now-defunct news channel Russia Today.)

In a September 2019 CBS News interview, Clinton said that Trump "knows he's an illegitimate president" because of "the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories"—a grab bag of excuses, many of which have proven largely unfounded. In October 2020, she told The Atlantic's Edward-Isaac Dovere that "there was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level. We still don't know what really happened."

Similarly, after narrowly losing the race to become Georgia's governor in November 2018, Stacey Abrams gave a concession speech in which she pointedly did not concede.

"I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election," Abrams said. But "I will not concede because the erosion of our democracy is not right."

"It was not a free and fair election," Abrams told MSNBC's Chris Hayes later that month. "We had thousands of Georgians who were purged from the rolls wrongly….Brian Kemp oversaw for eight years the systematic and systemic dismantling of our democracy and that means there could not be free and fair elections in Georgia this year."

To be clear, this is not to draw a direct parallel between Trump's actions after the 2020 election, and Clinton's and Abrams's grousing about their own respective electoral defeats. Trump went much further, filing dozens of meritless lawsuits trying to create a victory out of whole cloth; he even leaned on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes for him to win the state and implied that Raffensperger could face criminal prosecution if he did not. Trump's efforts, undertaken while he still held the presidency, would eventually lead hundreds of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to subvert the results of the election and force Congress to certify Trump as the winner.

Meanwhile, neither Clinton nor Abrams held political office when making their claims of illegitimate elections, and no supporters showed up in droves to sack a government building.

But in either case, haphazardly throwing around allegations of election fraud is unseemly in a nation that sees blessedly little actual, verifiable fraud. American voting precincts regularly conduct recounts, in plain view of the public. And an American president has yet to ban an opponent from running for office.

In Venezuela, on the other hand, people are taking to the streets to protest actual, verifiable fraud in their own presidential election.

We should count ourselves lucky to have a largely free and fair system—Venezuelans certainly can't.