Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
President’s party claims wins in most governor races.
Venezuela says Socialists victorious in 17 governor races
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela’s National Electoral Council said candidates for President Nicolas Maduro’s Socialist Party won nearly all of the 23 governorships up for grabs in Sunday’s regional elections. Opposition leaders disputed the accuracy of the vote count.
Tibisay Lucena, the pro-government president of the electoral council, said Socialist candidates won 17 of the 22 races in which the outcomes were considered “irreversible” late Sunday. One race was still undecided.
Lucena said 61 percent of the nation’s 18 million voters participated in the elections, far higher than many people had anticipated.
Even before the results were announced, opposition leader Gerardo Blyde said there was reason to question the results. He said the opposition’s count would be “very different” from the electoral council’s results.
“We have already alerted the international community, and we are alerting the country,” Blyde said.
The vote comes 2½ months after an internationally condemned election creating a pro-government super-congress loyal to Maduro. That July election led opponents, including President Donald Trump, to label Venezuela a dictatorship.
The stakes were dampened by Maduro’s insistence that all winners will be under the authority of his new Constituent Assembly, an all-powerful national legislature run by some of his closest allies.
“We’re Venezuela, and we have to show we’re a democratic country,” he said in a taped message to the nation. “They’ve said we’re a dictatorship. No.”
Opposition leaders rejected the notion that a vote alone could show whether Venezuela is a dictatorship or a democracy.
“We are fighting to recover our democracy,” said opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who twice has come within a razor-thin margin of winning the presidency.
Opposition officials had campaigned hard for seats even as they accused the government of sabotage. Across the country, voting started at 6 a.m. and was scheduled to run until 5 p.m. But Blyde said that many voting centers had opened late because of tardy government-appointed witnesses. Pro-government messages, he said, were still appearing on state TV in violation of election laws.
But Lucena told reporters that voting centers opened in record time and that problems with electricity and voting machines had been few and far between.
In Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city, witnesses said on social media that groups of masked men broke car windows, robbed purses and threw m Molotov cocktails at an opposition tent. But as of midday, government officials insisted that there had been no irregularities.
The pro-government electoral council last week abruptly decided to relocate hundreds of voting centers — mostly in opposition districts — for “security reasons.” On Sunday, many voters arrived to find that their polling stations had been moved to poor, often pro-government neighborhoods, where some of them feared to go.
At one center located at a school in northeast Caracas, a sign informed voters that they were now registered to cast ballots in a nearby slum. “They put up this obstacle so that we’ll give up and go back home,” said Ignacio Sanchez, a businessman who lived nearby.
Sanchez was sitting with a dozen neighbors, waiting for buses that the opposition promised to send to take them to their new polling place.
One man said his adult children had returned home because they didn’t want to go through the trouble of voting elsewhere. “But that’s what they want,” said a 74-year-old neighbor, Maria de Alba. “Voting is resisting.”
Susana Unda, a 57-yearold homemaker, was using her truck to transport voters whose polling sites were relocated.
“I was born in a democracy, and I want to die in a democracy,” she said.
Yet the opposition also faced a hurdle in the form of anti-government Venezuelans who felt that opposition leaders should have boycotted the state elections, as they did the July vote.
In the run-up to the vote, Maduro warned that new governors will have to take a loyalty oath submitting to the authority of the body that is rewriting the nation’s constitution. The opposition candidates vow to avoid submitting themselves to an assembly they consider illegal.
After casting their ballots, some proceeded to a tent where they could register to claim allocations of free food. Pro-government neighborhood activists have suggested a link between voting and government aid — a large incentive in a nation suffering from an economic crisis that has led to severe shortages.
“For the food, you know,” said Jose Blanco, a 57-year-old unemployed driver, handing over his ID to a government worker after casting his vote.