SAO PAULO (AP) — Venezuela’s opposition was dealt a blow Thursday when countries that had been pressuring President Nicolás Maduro to release vote tallies backing his claim to victory in last month’s presidential election began suggesting a repeat of the contest instead.
The proposal from the leftist governments of Brazil and Colombia, both Maduro allies, came less than three weeks after the results of the highly anticipated election came into question when the main opposition coalition revealed it has proof that its candidate defeated the president by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
The opposition categorically rejected any plan to redo the election.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, during a virtual news conference with Argentine media, said that repeating the July 28 presidential election would be “an insult” to the people, and she asked if a second election were held and Maduro still didn’t accept the results, “do we go for a third one?”
In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden expressed support for new elections in comments to reporters that the White House later appeared to back away from.
“We should let the authoritarian government redo the elections until they get the result they want.”
Isn’t it reasonable when both parties are claiming election fraud? Force a UN-overseen election on paper ballots.
It’s not like Maduro is going to give up power either way.
When one party claims election fraud and has receipts, and the other party claims no election fraud, that they won, and that they don’t have to reveal their evidence, the correct response is not “Both sides disagree, so let’s just do it over again!”
Would you prefer a civil war or an invasion to fix it then?
So combined with
It rather sounds like your end conclusion is “Let Maduro stay in power, who gives a fuck about democracy”?
Wow it’d be crazy if I’d advanced an alternative at the start to completely eliminate any pretense he has instead.
You mean when you said
?
Give him a do-over, and then acquiesce to the fact that he’s not giving up power even if he loses again. This must be some new form of democracy that I’m unfamiliar with.
Or you remove all pretense he has and his support either evaporates or is forced to publicly renounce democracy.
But I bet you don’t really care about that, you’ve already got a preference for which nation leads the invasion, huh?
As you said
So what does that matter? “Oh, he has no support now though!” So? People like you will still be wringing your hands and crying “B-b-but what if there’s a civil war??? We can’t provoke him! Living in a fascist state is better than that, because it’s MY kind of fascist, and fuck what the Venezuelan people think!”
Yeah, Brazil. But I guess that’s not as convenient a boogeyman as the US for justifying your favored fascists.
The US has enough foreign affairs to be handling at the moment. If there is going to be outside intervention, the Venezuelan people must take up arms in defense of their own rights first; and then that outside support should come from the region, not from a distant superpower.
Any other fascist apologia you wanna engage in?
Redoing the election only takes pressure off Maduro. It’s an empty gesture to appease the opposition for a time, which just gives Maduro room to plan for stealing the next election. And it drags things out for longer, which can easily cause some of the energy to be drained from his opposition, because movements like this tend to fade out after a while.
And what could possibly be the point? If he won’t concede this time, next time won’t be any different.
Better to keep putting as much pressure as possible on Maduro and his regime. No reason to make hanging on to power any easier for him, and even if he can’t be convinced to bow out gracefully, if things get bad enough for him, the decision might not be his to make.
They know that. That’s exactly the point of trying to deflect and downplay this whole fiasco.
Just logically speaking, a do over makes no sense because it was never the voting process that was in doubt. Both sides agree that the votes were all valid, they just disagree on the count… by a lot.
Well, they disagree about that and the need for any kind of transparency at all. Apparently Maduro thinks that elections should be run on the honor system.