There was another presidential election that happened recently in another country, and it was an astonishing one. And it has an aftermath that is ongoing. I don’t know if you followed this very closely. I did not.
President Nicolás Maduro was up for reelection in Venezuela in July. A lot was on the line in this election. Their economy is in ruins, partly because of Maduro’s policies, but made worse by US sanctions. Millions of people have left the country. One in five people have emigrated.
Also, during Maduro’s time as president, there’s been an increase in government surveillance and government repression, arbitrary detentions of government opponents or perceived opponents, security forces arresting people or killing people during protests. This is according to the United Nations and human rights groups.
But every six years in Venezuela, there’s a presidential election. And the country does have a real political opposition. And the way they conduct their elections in Venezuela has all kinds of safeguards against election fraud.
It’s a system put in place by the socialist president Hugo Chavez, because he didn’t want there to be a shadow of a doubt. He wanted to prove to the world and to his opponents that he really had gotten the most votes every time. Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center observes elections all around the globe, once said that out of dozens of elections that they’d monitored, Venezuela’s election system was, quote, “the best in the world”.
And this year, that got put to the test, when this brutal government went to the polls with the very real possibility that they might get voted out of office. And the way it played out on the ground was this vast national drama in thousands of polling stations. Really, when you hear the details, it is remarkable what people did, hoping for a fair election.
Read the full note at This American Life