More than a week after millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to pick their new president, the autocrat Nicolás Maduro remains ensconced in the Miraflores presidential palace, despite evidence that he lost the election to his opponent Edmundo González. Shortly after the voting ended, the government-dominated National Electoral Council (NEC) announced that Maduro was the winner and that he had beat opposition candidate González by seven percentage points. The only problem: the NEC has yet to release any of the detailed data to the public in what is shaping up to be the most transparent election fraud in the history of Latin America.
Maduro’s political opponents were able to acquire more than 80% of the vote tally sheets from the thousands of polling stations dotting the country. Those numbers paint a strikingly different picture, showing González demolishing Maduro by an astounding 35 percentage points. The Washington Post did its own calculations and found that, of the 23,270 tally sheets received from the opposition, González won with about 67% of the vote to Maduro’s paltry 30%. The numbers were so lopsided that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement on Aug. 1 declaring Gonzalez the indisputable victor: “Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people, that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.” The Americans weren’t the only ones — the European Union, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama and others have either questioned the results given by Maduro’s administration or called Venezuela’s latest election a sham.
Now, U.S. policymakers are likely asking themselves some big questions. Can Maduro be pushed out, and if so, how and at what price? If not, is there a way to at least convince Maduro to establish a national unity government? Should Washington step aside and allow Latin America’s heavyweights like Brazil, Mexico and Colombia to take ownership of the issue? And is the stream of migration out of Venezuela — nearly 8 million have left over the last decade — bound to get worse?
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