Of all the different scenarios in Venezuela¡¯s election on Sunday, we witnessed the most likely one: Nicolas Maduro was announced as the winner of the vote by the country¡¯s electoral authority controlled by the authoritarian president¡¯s close allies.
Shortly past midnight in Caracas, the National Electoral Council said that Maduro got 51% of the vote compared with 44% for rival Edmundo Gonzalez, despite polls showing the opposition candidate clearly ahead by double-digit margins.
The electoral body didn¡¯t produce the individual tallies from each voting station to support such result after saying it received a ¡°terrorist¡± attack on its transmission systems. How inconvenient! It also called the result ¡°irreversible¡± even if 20% of the votes were still uncounted and the difference between both candidates was just 7 percentage points.
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