When Gloria gets sleepy and turns off the TV, the house falls silent. She shuffles down the hall to her dark bedroom and turns on a small lamp. She has been living alone for six years. Her children and grandchildren have left Venezuela and there is no sign that they will return. In 1998 she voted for Hugo Chavez. At that time she saw Hello Presidentthe program presented by the Bolivarian leader and broadcast at any time, up to five times a day, and laughed at his witty remarks. This man had something for everyone. Suddenly he would start singing, reciting poetry, hitting the air with a baseball bat. It was a case in point. Over time, Gloria (she does not give her last name for security reasons) became disillusioned with the Bolivarian revolution and preferred to tune into soap operas. She never liked Nicolás Maduro. Last Sunday she went to vote with some friends, early. In the afternoon she followed the end of the day on a national broadcast. She spent the hours distracted, with that background noise of the announcers, sending and receiving memes, chains on WhatsApp, watching videos on TikTok. Some of them outraged her, others made her laugh. It was 00.10 on Monday and she was sleepy when she saw on the screen that they were connecting to the National Electoral Council (CNE), which was about to announce the winner of the presidential elections. Elvis Amoroso, its president, appeared in the frame.
It had begun 24 hours earlier. People had begun arriving at the polling stations early on Sunday morning. They brought folding chairs and tables where they played cards. They had to choose between Nicolás Maduro, the president, the successor of Chávez, the last wall of the revolution; and Edmundo González, the opposite, the change, the change of direction for Venezuela after 25 years of chavismo. Both sides had been saying throughout the campaign that they were going to win. One side showed some polls, the other, others. However, the atmosphere was that the government had worn itself out in all this time, a sea of minutes and hours of extreme political polarization, of authoritarian forms, of the takeover of part of the institutions, of the persecution of the opposition. Edmundo González, but above all María Corina Machado, the true leader of the opposition, banned from these elections, had managed to move a large part of the country. Chavismo had not said its last word either. At the moment of truth, he also mobilized his base, public employees, state contractors and their families.
That’s why Jennie K. Lincoln, the director for the Americas at the Carter Center, one of the few organizations authorized to conduct an observation mission on election day, was surprised by the quietness in the CNE, located in a building in the center of Caracas, in a plaza with a bust of a Simon Bolivar looking back. She watched its silent rooms through a screen from the Renaissance Hotel, where she waited with her team of ten people. They had been preparing for this day for a month. They had met with the teams of the two candidates, they had verified the system, they had set up another small command in other parts of the country. They had reviewed polls that they reviewed with skepticism. And, at this point, they did not quite understand what was happening. There were no screens with data, numbers, graphs that go up or down depending on the information that is coming in. Only five empty chairs in a deserted room. Lincoln had never experienced a similar situation before, neither in Brazil nor in Colombia, the last elections she had observed. The final count should have been announced by ten o’clock, but no one said anything. Hours of confusion followed. Lincoln went down to the hotel restaurant for food. The night was going to be long.
Delsa Solórzano was trying to get into the electoral authority building. There were three rings of security around her. It was about to get dark and Chavista supporters were starting to arrive, convinced that they had won, despite the silence of the authorities. Solórzano, the right-hand woman of María Corina Machado, the opposition representative to the CNE, tried to get in all day, as stipulated by law. Since they wouldn’t let her in, she notified the Carter Center, the UN observers. “Miss, you can’t come in. There are no chairs…” they told her. “It doesn’t matter,” she replied, “I don’t mind standing.” There was no response to that. She wrote a resigned message to Machado, locked up at that moment in her campaign office. “Insist, but stay calm,” she replied back. The first bulletin was about to be issued and Solórzano was not going to be a witness.
Then, the confusion over the voting records began. According to experts, the Venezuelan voting system is reliable and difficult to manipulate. Its design, if followed step by step, prevents cheating. It is more reliable and technological than the rest of the region. It applies a biometric identification of the voters, but the CNE is prevented from knowing how each person voted by separating the data from the citizens. At the end, a paper certificate is printed that the voter verifies and deposits in a ballot box. At the end of the day, the machine first prints a record with the result —in front of electoral witnesses— and then sends the data by telephone or satellite to the computing center. If something goes wrong, the printout is there. The problem is that in many centers throughout the country they did not let the opposition see the record and the information was sent to Caracas. The result reflected there was not manipulated, it was not possible, but since they did not see it, there was no way to corroborate it.
Solórzano and Machado were prepared. They had distributed 90,000 people throughout Venezuela with the mission of receiving these records, photographing them and sending them to an opposition team that would computerize them. Weeks before, they had designed a simple, clean, easy-to-consult website where they could check the results. The opposition, in this time, had always been outwitted by the Chavistas, experts in electoral guerrilla warfare since the time of Chávez. They had learned by dint of defeats. They arrived at the day trained. Therefore, two simultaneous counts are produced. The CNE’s—which cannot be verified anywhere because the data is not broken down by cities and municipalities—and the opposition’s, which is slowly growing in evidence. “We were prepared for something. We wanted to make it clear,” Machado’s people said.
The country is plunged into confusion in the following hours. At first glance, the opposition sees from the records they receive that they win easily. Evidence is needed. “THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO TAKE THE RECORDS,” tweets María Corina at 6:00 p.m., the official closing time of the polls. “Victory for the Venezuelan people,” replies Nicolás Maduro Guerra, the president’s son, at 6:52 p.m. “We know what happened,” insists Diosdado Cabello, the number two of Chavismo, a few minutes later. Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, had stepped in: “We must respect the will of the Venezuelan people.” Jorge Rodríguez, Maduro’s main political operator, begins to send messages on social networks and in public appearances implying that the victory is irreversible, despite the fact that the attorney general had threatened to jail anyone who preempted the official result.
The first bulletin is delayed by four hours. Amoroso, after midnight, already on July 29, speaks of a victory for Maduro, 51.2% against Edmundo González, 44.2%. He will later say that this delay was caused by a cyber attack, the prosecutor will add that it was carried out from North Macedonia (the government of that country denies it). It will never be clear how this hacking affected the records, and if that is the ultimate reason why they are hidden today. Lincoln, from the Carter Center, was waiting in the hotel for them to be shown, he wanted to see the data. Seven days later, it is 6:30 p.m. in Atlanta, the city where he lives and to which he returned from Caracas, it is 25 degrees and there is a forecast of rain, and he still has not seen the records.
On Sunday, Tarek William Saab, the attorney general, voted and then went to the situation room of the Attorney General’s Office. In the nineties, Saab went to prison to visit Chavez, imprisoned for a failed coup in 1992, and gave him his poetry collections. The commander liked them and when he left, when he started the Bolivarian revolution, he always had Saab nearby, who has now risen to the point of being there in front of screens, telephones and computers, controlling the country’s security, which is controlled with an iron fist by Chavismo. A hammer that falls on those who do not profess the revolutionary idea. The day was peaceful, but he was on the lookout for disturbances, which, of course, could only be from the opposition, according to him. William (who speaks on condition that his full name not be given), in Maracaibo, a city governed by the opposition, voted for Maduro and went home early because he says he was afraid. Days later he will say that it is true, that the proof of victory has not been provided, but that Venezuela has suffered greatly at the hands of foreign powers that have imposed sanctions on it, such as the United States. This, he thinks, was not a fair contest, so neither will the result be.
And so a few minutes after midnight passed. Amoroso came out with a piece of paper in his hand and announced Maduro as the winner. It would later be revealed that the document he is holding in his hands should have come from the totaling room, a room where only the results are printed, the sum is automatic, but that it was actually printed in his office. Gloria, the lady who lives alone, felt like shouting at the television: “They robbed us!” She heard other voices of indignation in the street and looked out. Soon the pots and pans would start banging.
Maolis Castro contributed to this report.
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