Nicolás Maduro warned that the elections of Dec. 6 will bring a surprise to Venezuela. (He's right, but it won't be the surprise he's expecting.) This time, it wasn't a little bird that told him, but his hard-working election experts. Even if he clearly loses, he'll say that he again won by a narrow margin, as happened in 2013. We'll see if he can.
If they manage to win through vote rigging, Maduro thinks, Congress will remain his or almost his. Some Chavistas say that there is no danger in conceding Parliament by a simple majority. On the other hand, Diosdado Cabello, the powerful speaker of the Assembly, doesn't want to risk losing the majority, and with it his National Assembly presidency. That seems dangerous to him personally, especially after accusations of drug trafficking were levied against him. You don't gamble with power, as the Castro brothers intone incessantly.
What a surprise it would be if Maduro wins. If it happened in a fair contest, such a victory would demonstrate how out of step Venezuelans are. Nevertheless, according to the Chavistas, Venezuelans will neither punish nor replace the leaders who have so greatly harmed them, raising the percentage of poor people from 40 percent to 78 percent of the census, while 1.5 million souls have decided to emigrate because they no longer harbor any hopes.
It's odd. Wherever elections are truly free, people (except for Venezuelans) flatly reject the corrupt politicians and functionaries who squander public funds and are responsible for the world's highest rate of inflation. Add to that a brutal scarcity of consumer goods and a bloody social violence that has wiped out people amid an orgy of robberies and extortion.
There is no doubt that Maduro's victory would be a huge surprise. If it happened, it would prove not only that millions of people vote differently from the way other mortals vote, but also that Venezuelans are pathological liars who lie to all the pollsters who earlier asked him for whom they planned to vote.
They massively assure the pollsters, by a difference that sometimes exceeds 30 percent of those surveyed, that they'll vote for the candidates opposed to the immense mess created in the country by the 16 years of Chavista vandalism. Would they then betray that commitment and vote for the adversary they claimed to detest?
Is it a question of obscure psychological problems? If the Venezuelans sprung a surprise and actually voted for a Chavista majority, they would prove to be masochists. In that case, the problem would not be political but psychological. Eighty-two percent of the registered voters opine that Maduro and his government are the pits, but then would support them at the ballot box. Seventy-six percent think that the situation will worsen, but they would be saying they want it to continue. Who understands them, then?
The surprise that Maduro predicts would show that Venezuelans enjoy poverty, corruption, armed gangs, being afraid of walking the streets, being unable to buy food or medicine, and being colonized and exploited by the Cubans. Strange behavior.
Let's be serious. Nothing is wrong with the Venezuelans. They're like everyone else. Chavismo wins by fraud alone. It has been thus since the recall referendum of 2004, when authorities outright refused to open the boxes with the ballots and carry out a manual recount of the votes. They agreed only to examine the boxes they selected, something accepted -- to their shame -- by former presidents Carter and Gaviria.
How do they do it? It all begins with the announcement of a survey. Shortly before the election, some pollster states that the trend has reversed and the pro-Chavista vote is coming to the surface. Then they accommodate the votes to the predicted results to give verisimilitude to the fraud.
This has just been denounced by expert Joaquín Pérez Rodríguez in a persuasive open letter. How did Nicolás Maduro's sinking popularity suddenly improve by 11 percent 72 hours before the voting, and why? It's not credible.
The anonymous video "7K" that is circulating profusely through the Internet would explain the rest. It has left me intrigued. "7K" represents the 7,000 persons who supposedly will prevent fraud this time. Allegedly, the government holds 2,500,000 false voter registration cards -- dead people, emigrants, displaced folks, persistent abstainers -- that it slips into thousands of polling places controlled by Chavistas in areas favorable to them or far from the opposition.
"7K" vows that this time it won't allow victory to be stolen away because it will be able to count all the real votes, from all the real polling places, in real time. It says that it will go as far as necessary to make the people's vote count. The democrats, with 7,000 assured votes leading the operation, intend to demonstrate that Venezuelans are human beings just like everyone else, not self-contradicting masochists. However, they need Venezuelans to vote in massive numbers. They'll do the rest. That's the surprise.
(AP photo)
