Venezuelans vote peacefully
SUCRE, VENEZUELA >> She had heard the calls for a boycott of the election. She worried that the ruling party might toy with the results and undermine her candidate should he prevail. And the day promised to be a very long one: The government had relocated her voting site from the place she had cast ballots since 1972 to a distant, crime-ridden neighborhood.
But Roberta Elicelia Castillo Isturiz, 77, was not about to sit out regional elections on Sunday in Venezuela, the country’s first election in the months since President Nicolás Maduro forced through a major consolidation of power that most of the nation’s neighbors say amounts to a dictatorship.
“The worst thing is to stay at home,” Castillo said as she sat in her old voting site in this municipality in the state of Miranda, in northern Venezuela, waiting for a bus to take her to the new site. “Hope is the last thing to be lost.”
Amid an economic crisis that has caused crippling shortages of food and medicine and spurred a sharp increase in violence, Venezuelans went to the polls on Sunday to vote for governors in the country’s 23 states.
The voting unfolded peacefully, free of the sort of violent political protests that ravaged the streets of the capital and other cities earlier this year. But it was colored by widespread uncertainty among voters about where and when they could vote — and about whether the results would even make a difference in the fortunes of the country.
Polling in the days leading up the vote suggested that the opposition was poised to win most of the contests. But the opposition accused the government of trying to confuse voters or suppress the vote by relocating more than 200 voting sites in recent days and printing ballots that included the names of opposition candidates who had lost in the primaries.
The opposition said the government’s tricks continued on Sunday, as allegations of electoral malfeasance against the federal electoral commission piled up. Government election officials were accused of purposely delaying the opening of some polling stations in opposition strongholds.
A voting site in one proopposition municipality in Miranda, which abuts the capital district of Caracas, did not have power until about 9 a.m., three hours after the polls were supposed to open. Opposition supporters staffing the site saw a conspiracy in the delay and said government officials did not seem too eager to fix the problem.
“That’s not happening for no reason,” said George Rotker, a chemical engineer who was serving as a poll monitor for the opposition.
Maduro has rejected accusations that he is running a dictatorship, and has pointed to the elections as proof of Venezuelan democracy.
With this argument in mind, opposition factions urged supporters to abstain from voting, arguing that the election was a sham and that participation would only validate Maduro’s authoritarian political program. They feared that Maduro, even if his party was soundly defeated across the country, would somehow commit fraud in the vote count.
Though a full tally was not expected until late Sunday night at the earliest, and most likely Monday morning, turnout appeared to be significantly lower than in past regional elections.
Abraham Semerene, 22, a security guard from the municipality of Los Salias, voted for the first time in his life in legislative elections in 2015. But he has already become disillusioned with Venezuelan politics.
“You lose hope,” he said. “The government does whatever it wants. They have too much to lose to give up power.”
Even among those opposition supporters who turned out, many were doubtful that their votes would have any impact — or even be fairly counted.