Unprecedented Election for a New National Assembly
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Voting will take place using new domestically-built electronic touchscreen machines. In March of this year over 49,000 voting machines -- almost all of the country's supply -- were destroyed in an arson attack on the warehouse where they were being stored. After an individual votes using the touchscreen, the system prints a paper ballot showing their selection(s), which the voter can verify before depositing the paper in the ballot box. The voter then signs and leaves a fingerprint in a record book, making it extremely difficult for fraud to be committed. The paper ballots can also be compared to electronic tallies in an audit of the results. Venezuela's voting system is widely regarded as one of the most technologically advanced, transparent and reliable in the world.
The election is being conducted in keeping with World Health Organization biosafety guidelines. Face masks will be mandatory for voters and officials and there will be sanitizer at all voting stations. The touchscreen machines will be disinfected after every vote. The Bolivarian Militia are charged with seeing to it that physical distancing protocols are maintained inside and outside polling places, and electoral staff are required to test negative for COVID-19 before assuming their duties.
The President of the National Electoral Council, Indira Alfonzo, announced this week that over 200 international electoral observers from 34 countries, along with the Council of Latin American Electoral Experts, will be involved in monitoring the vote. The European Union declined the invitation to send an observer mission after conditions it attempted to impose, including that the election be postponed, were not accepted by Venezuela.
December 4, 2020. International observers in Venezuela to monitor the
elections.
The U.S. government -- with support from both Republicans and Democrats -- has been actively interfering in this election as part of its unrelenting regime change agenda. On top of its brutal economic sanctions and theft of the Venezuelan people's resources, it has sanctioned more officials of the Venezuelan government and two officials of the National Electoral Council, including its president, Indira Alfonzo, accusing them of "election interference" for refusing to allow Venezuela's constitution, laws and sovereignty to be set aside so the U.S. can decide for Venezuelans what a "free and fair" election looks like!
The coalition of U.S.-backed opposition parties -- referred to as the "G4,'' which includes Juan Guaidó's Popular Will party, along with Justice First, Democratic Action and A New Era -- are predictably boycotting the election and calling on Venezuelans to do the same. However sections of some G4 parties have rejected the boycott campaign and are participating in the election with candidates, clearly fed up with their leaders' preference for violent coup attempts over elections and support for the U.S. economic war against their country. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on five of these opposition leaders who broke with the G4, accusing them of "complicity" with the government.
In sync with the U.S. imperialists, the Trudeau government continues to disgrace itself by singing the praises of the hapless Juan Guaidó, referring to the U.S. puppet as the "legitimate" president of Venezuela interested only in "restoring democracy" in the country, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Canada also reflexively declared the December 6 election to be "illegitimate," as it has every other election since the last parliamentary election in 2015, which a coalition of opposition parties won with a large majority. That opposition-controlled National Assembly, whose term is coming to an end, is the only branch of the Venezuelan state Canada considers "legitimate" even though one of its first acts was to defy a Supreme Court order to suspend three deputies accused of vote buying. After that the National Assembly went on to pass laws deemed unconstitutional, leading the Supreme Court to declare it in contempt of the law, and render its decisions null.
From the outset, the opposition coalition engaged in one illegal manoeuvre after another to try to oust President Nicolás Maduro from his elected position. When that failed the Assembly became a base for creating the fictitious "interim presidency" of deputy Juan Guaidó as the U.S and Canada attempted to foist an illegal parallel government on the Venezuelan people. It was also used treacherously to promote the U.S-led economic war against them, which Canada and the EU are also part of.
Stakes are therefore very high in the December 6 election. There are 107 political parties and an unprecedented 14,400 candidates vying for seats in an enlarged National Assembly. The parties are grouped mainly in five blocs. One is the Great Patriotic Pole, comprised of the governing United Socialist Party (PSUV) plus seven other parties. Another alliance of parties, the Popular Revolutionary Alternative, also identifies as Chavista and part of the Bolivarian Revolution. Anti-Chavista opposition parties, unable to unite in a single coalition this time, are divided among three separate alliances.
December 3, 2020, Caracas.
The opposition faction headed by Guaidó and Leopoldo López recently announced that along with boycotting the election it will hold its own "popular consultation" from December 6-12. These gangsters who were behind at least two failed attempts to install themselves in power through a violent coup d'état, and who have all along supported the murderous U.S. sanctions, are asking Venezuelans, including those living outside the country, to answer three survey questions: Do you demand the end of the usurpation of the presidency by Nicolás Maduro and call for free, fair and verifiable presidential and parliamentary elections? Do you reject the event of December 6 and ask the international community to ignore it? Do you demand that the necessary steps be taken before the international community to activate cooperation, accompaniment and assistance to rescue our democracy?
But the Venezuelan people have not resisted every manner of perfidy and hardship, even at the cost of their lives, to defend their Bolivarian Revolution only to do an about-face and agree that the solution to the country's problems lies in handing over control of its institutions and resources to self-serving local and foreign oligarchs so they can advance their own private interests at the expense of the Venezuelan nation and people -- a counterrevolutionary neo-liberal agenda these elements have tried but so far failed to impose by force.
To the contrary, the organized people of Venezuela have shown themselves to be staunch defenders of their right to self-determination and sovereignty, the international rule of law, and the right of all peoples to live in peace, solving their differences politically rather than through war and coercion. The example of elections in Venezuela, along with those of Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador, among others, are providing the peoples of Our America with profound lessons about the need for the peoples to acquire political power to be able to exercise their sovereignty. The U.S. imperialists and their toadies, like the Trudeau government, will never recognize any result which does not permit them to do whatever they want in a country and to a country. They are past masters at engineering colour revolutions, constitutional coups and all manner of brutal acts, such as took place in Bolivia during the year of the coup they engineered in that country, and which continue in Haiti, Honduras, Colombia and other countries thanks to their criminal use of subversion, interference, assassinations and other mostly covert methods to undermine any attempts of the people to exercise their sovereign decision-making power.
Canadians stand as one with the people of
Venezuela and sincerely hope the results of the December 6 elections
favour them. No to the interference of the U.S. imperialists, the
Organization of American States and Canada's bogus Lima Group
and all other "multilateral" fora used as platforms to attack the
Bolivarian revolution and the nation-building project of the people of
Venezuela!
(With files from Venezuelanalysis.com, Peoples Dispatch, Página 12. Photos: CNE, @NicolasMaduro)
This article was published in
Volume 50 Number 47 - December 5, 2020
Article Link:
Unprecedented Election for a New National Assembly - Margaret Villamizar
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca