By Carlos Lopez Dorante.
Additional reporting by Carlos Camacho in Caracas.
The President of the Venezuelan Electoral Council (CNE in Spanish), Indira Alfonzo, informed early this Monday morning, December 7, that in the first official bulletin, and after having transmitted 82.35 % of the electoral data, the participation in the parliamentary elections was at 31 % of the electoral roll.
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Nicolas Maduro spent five years ignoring the opposition-held National Assembly legislative, but what he cannot ignore is a severe drop in turnout for parliamentary elections between 2015 to 2020, from a record-breaking 74.2% to the paltry 31% the regime admitted this Monday. In 2015, almost 15 million Venezuelans gave the opposition more than two-thirds of the National Assembly, the first supermajority in Venezuelan political history. Sunday, only five million or voters bothered showing up after threats, rounding up by police of voters, gifts prohibited by electoral law, and other enticements.
The opposition at large rejected the vote. Some minority opposition parties, newly formed and with ties to the regime, obtained a minority representation, with the candidates of Maduro getting 67.6% in a vote rejected by the US, the European Union, and the 16 countries of the Lima Group as fraudulent.
Alfonzo -a regime official sanctioned by the US precisely for organizing a vote that undermines democracy- detailed that, with 5,264,104 votes totaled at this time, the results obtained give the majority to the Chavista alliance the Patriotic Pole with 67.5% of votes. The opposition alliance got 4%, and the Communist Party of Venezuela got 2,73%.
“The winner is the people, the institutions, the democratic exercise of their right to vote,” Alfonzo said.
