Venezuela’s Strongman Was Confident of Victory. Then Came the Shock.
Venezuela’s government believed its control of all levers of power would give the country’s authoritarian president an Election Day victory. A rebellion by its supporters undid the plan.
Venezuela’s Strongman Was Confident of Victory. Then Came the Shock.
Venezuela’s government believed its control of all levers of power would give the country’s authoritarian president an Election Day victory. A rebellion by its supporters undid the plan.
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Anatoly Kurmanaev reported from Venezuela during most of President Nicolás Maduro’s 11-year rule. He returned to cover his latest re-election bid.
For the Venezuelan government, everything seemed to be falling in place.
Francisco Torrealba, a senior ruling party official, described being in an electoral command center in the country’s capital, Caracas, on Election Day last month, watching the computer monitors with confidence as the presidential vote neared its close.
The charts showed that a crucial party support base in Caracas had shown up in force.
The picture was much the same in other traditional government strongholds nationwide, he said. This assured officials that a combination of high turnout among loyalists and suppressing the vote for the opposition would propel Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, to a presidential election victory.
“We were calm,” Mr. Torrealba, a veteran lawmaker and a senior official of the ruling Socialist Party, said in an interview, describing the mood among government officials during the July 28 vote. “We did everything necessary to achieve a good victory.”
What happened next appears to have delivered a seismic jolt to the government’s expectations.
Vote tallies showed that the ruling party’s supporters in the public sector and poor neighborhoods had abandoned the country’s leader in droves, according to vote tallies obtained by the opposition. An electoral disaster loomed.
“We were betrayed, because they said they were going to vote for Maduro and what did they do? They voted for the lady,” said a ruling party activist in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution.
The activist was referring to the popular leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado, who was backing Mr. Maduro’s rival, Edmundo González.
As electronic results poured into Caracas, the government-controlled electoral council suddenly interrupted transmission for approximately two hours, according to two people familiar with what happened. The delay, analysts said, seemed to give the government time to switch to a Plan B.
Shortly after midnight, the electoral council declared Mr. Maduro the winner, announcing vote totals that do not appear to have been based on the ballots recorded by the electoral system, according to many analysts, opposition leaders and a person with direct knowledge of the council’s decision.
The announcement plunged Venezuela into a political crisis that has claimed at least 22 lives in violent demonstrations, led to the jailing of more than 2,000 people and provoked global denunciation.
The government has refused to release any vote tallies to stand up Mr. Maduro’s claim of victory. His re-election has been rejected by the United States and many other countries in the Americas and Europe. It has also been debunked by statistical studies of vote tallies obtained by the opposition, including one conducted by The New York Times.
Mr. Maduro has responded to criticism by doubling down on his repression of opponents and breaking ties with nations that rejected his victory.
The election has left him facing one of the toughest decisions of his 11-year rule: whether to brazenly hold onto power no matter the cost, or accept a political compromise that could weaken his grip on the country.
This article is based on roughly two dozen interviews with party officials, poll workers, opposition activists and election experts.
Some of them are in hiding and many spoke on condition of anonymity. Some fear being swept up in a crackdown by the government since the election, while others do not want to jeopardize their political positions.
‘Politics Is What We Know’
Mr. Maduro faced a dilemma heading into the election. The vote needed to be free enough to convince the United States to lift crippling economic sanctions, but not so free as to endanger his rule.
A victory would deliver Mr. Maduro a third term in office and propel Chavismo, the movement founded by his predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez, into its third decade in power.
Mr. Maduro took few chances.
He allowed Mr. González, a little-known retired diplomat, to challenge him, while banning all major opposition leaders, including Ms. Machado, from running.
He then brought to bear the full weight of Venezuela’s state against Mr. González’s campaign. His government jailed dozens of his campaign workers, sowed confusion in the voting process and denied the opposition access to mainstream media and advertising.
To win votes for Mr. Maduro, the ruling party bet on its time-tested maquinaria, the political machinery that for years has used the financial muscle of an oil state to bring supporters to the polls through a combination of handouts, coercion and appeals to loyalty.
Technological advances had also broadened the government’s electoral tools. Party activists, from neighborhood organizers to government ministers, were charged with getting 10 voters to polling stations and updating their progress on an app monitored by campaign managers.
“Doing politics is what we know,” Nicolás Maduro Guerra, a ruling party lawmaker and the president’s son, said in an interview days before the election. “We are confident in the victory, not because we are triumphalists, but because we have done our homework.”
As the vote neared, the government’s internal polling showed Mr. Maduro within striking distance of Mr. González, a margin of error they believed could be overcome by maximizing turnout, according to two people familiar with those surveys.
In interviews, party officials said they had dismissed multiple public polls showing Mr. González far ahead as a mirage. Even some opposition-leaning experts urged caution, noting that millions of Venezuelans remained on the voter registry but have since gone abroad to escape economic depression.
But the triumphalism of senior party officials contrasted with the growing alarm among their grass roots organizers. The government’s move to shift much of the economy into private hands to revive growth had led to big public spending cuts, reducing the handouts and social services traditionally used to mobilize the vote.
The ruling party’s campaign this year lacked the financial resources of past efforts, said one party organizer in Maracaibo. In previous campaigns, she said, the government gave out everything from motorbikes to refrigerators. Ahead of this vote, all she got was boxes of poor-quality food and house paint.
“I knew what was coming,” she said.
Gripped by Euphoria
The opposition, on the other hand, was feverishly organizing and also using technology to try to even the playing field.
Ms. Machado, Mr. González’s political patron, organized tens of thousands of supporters into electoral clusters charged with obtaining printed tallies from the country’s 30,000 voting machines.
The tallies, the opposition believed, would allow them to recreate the results and expose any potential fraud. Ms. Machado’s team created its own app to allow volunteers to report turnout and upload the tallies.
Mr. Torrealba, the senior ruling party official, said he spent Election Day morning surveying voting centers in the rural state of Portuguesa, where he was encouraged by the long waiting lines.
“It is sealed,” a mid-ranking party official in Mr. Maduro’s campaign texted a Times journalist in the early afternoon, reflecting the government’s belief that a high turnout would lead to victory. (Nearly 81 percent of Venezuela residents would end up casting a ballot that day, up from 48 percent in the last presidential vote, according to an analysis of demographic data and opposition tallies by Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver.)
As the ruling party focused on getting supporters to the polls, it also tried to suppress the opposition’s ability to monitor irregularities. In many centers, electoral officials backed by soldiers told poll volunteers and opposition witnesses that they would not be given the printed tallies, in violation of electoral law.
Still, after the polls started closing after 6 p.m., activists in many voting centers were able to scan printouts and transmit them to the opposition campaign.
As the tallies accumulated, the opposition grew increasingly convinced that its candidate was headed for a historic victory.
Neighborhoods that had voted for Chavista candidates for decades — in Caracas’s poorest neighborhoods or in rural areas like Portuguesa — had turned from Mr. Maduro, an opposition election analysis shared with The Times found.
“We were gripped by euphoria,” said one opposition organizer, Andrés Schloeter. “Finally, we have done it!”
But, the opposition’s celebration was short lived.
‘They Are Going to Steal the Election’
About two hours after the polls closed, voting machines across the country suddenly lost connection to the electoral council’s headquarters, halting the transmission of results, according to two people familiar the process, as well as interviews with multiple poll workers who attempted to upload the results.
The government, without providing evidence, would later blame the technical glitch on a hacking attack from North Macedonia.
But many analysts and opposition leaders believe the government halted the transmission to switch to a new strategy.
Shortly after the transmission went down, Mr. Maduro’s campaign chief, Jorge Rodríguez, gave the first hint of what was coming. “Today has been a victory for everyone,” Mr. Rodríguez told reporters with a broad smile on his face.
“This is when we realized: They are going to steal the election,” said Mr. Schloeter, the opposition organizer.
As the electoral council remained silent, the ruling party held a victory concert next to the presidential palace. Several thousand public employees and Chavista activists danced to bands, including a Maduro tribute band whose songs include “Super Mustache,” and “Nicolás, Nicolás, Nicolás.”
Finally, just after midnight, Elvis Amoroso, the head of the electoral council and a ruling party official, proclaimed Mr. Maduro the winner to a stunned nation, saying he had come out seven percentage points ahead of Mr. González.
Yet the figures that Mr. Amoroso read aloud did not come from the electoral council’s database, according to a person with direct knowledge of events in the council’s headquarters on election night.
How those figures were arrived at remains a mystery.
Mr. Amoroso did not respond to a request for comment sent through the electoral council.
Vote Tallies Tell a Different Story
The government’s move had a crucial flaw: Its attempts to prevent the opposition from obtaining voting tallies largely failed, said Juan Barreto, a former leftist ally of Mr. Maduro who broke with him and supported a third-party candidate in the elections.
Ms. Machado’s poll volunteers managed to obtain about 30 percent of the tallies on Election Day, her campaign said, and more tallies kept trickling in over the following days.
The scale of the government’s defeat reflected in those tallies made it difficult to disprove, said one ruling party poll volunteer in Maracaibo.
“The votes were too many, we couldn’t invent anything or fight back,” she said.
By Tuesday, the opposition had posted 83 percent of the vote tallies online, showing Mr. González 37 percentage points ahead of Mr. Maduro.
Mr. Torrealba claims the opposition’s tallies are fake, but said the ruling party had no plans to publish its own tallies. He claimed the government was not obligated to do so and had never done it before.
But in 2013 the party did precisely that, publishing tallies to disprove the opposition’s fraud claims in a tight election won by Mr. Maduro.
Despite angry calls for accountability and transparency, Mr. Torrealba presented the July 28 elections as a fait accompli.
Mr. Maduro, at the ruling party’s victory concert on Election Day, proclaimed: “I can say before the people of Venezuela and the world: I am Nicolás Maduro Moros, the re-elected president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. And I will defend our democracy!”
Mariana Martínez contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela, and Sheyla Urdaneta from Maracaibo, Venezuela.
Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Russia and its transformation following the invasion of Ukraine. More about Anatoly Kurmanaev
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