Voting in a dictatorship is not for electing, it is for organized crime

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) Twenty-first century socialism’s dictatorships that control Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia have as their strategy the counterfeiting of the popular will to hold power indefinitely. Castrochavism has made the electoral manipulation one of its essential features and to accomplish that, it has institutionalized fraud, supplantation, and crime that eliminate universal suffrage and free and fair elections. Voting in a dictatorship is not for electing because the voter votes but does not elect, the voter is cheated with a Transnational Organized Crime’s system that has just been applied in Bolivia and that will soon be repeated on 6 December (6D) in Venezuela.

To elect means “to choose or prefer something or someone towards an end”. Basically, it is an act of expressing the voter’s will that “empowers the voter to decide” exercising the will of free determination. This is why “elections” that must be periodic, free, and fair, and be based on universal secret suffrage as an expression of the peoples’ sovereignty” is one of the fundamental components of democracy, as established in the Interamerican Democratic Charter.

To vote is the act of expressing one’s will to elect, but 21st Century Socialism’s dictatorships have turned it into an advertising and mechanical process that manipulates, through an institutionalized system of fraud with consensual flaws that disfigure outcomes and supplant the individual and popular will, to come up with a result that violates freedom, eliminates justice, kills universal suffrage and makes the peoples’ sovereignty disappear.

Voting in vote-catching dictatorships enable these to disguise as democratic processes the transnational organized crime’s regimes controlling all power and manipulating the branches of government to sustain themselves with impunity and violence. The vote-catching dictatorship system has been so successful that Cuba’s dictatorship now holds elections in dictatorship, taking all Cubans to vote to produce the outcome the regime has already prepared beforehand.

Vote-catching dictatorships apply systematic and factual fraud. Systematic fraud is institutionalized fraud, that which has been included in their constitutions, laws, and dictatorial judicial proceedings to eliminate universal suffrage, claiming to have it to make the equality of all citizens disappear and be able to build absolute majorities with relative minorities. Factual fraud is that which -using the dictatorial structure- the citizenry is misled with conditions created by the very own dictatorship to undermine their consent, manipulate the votes through systems reliant on technology, create counterfeited voters’ registration, persecute opposition members, establish judicial defenselessness of the fraud, and grant absolute impunity to those committing these misdeeds that end up being rewarded with new positions in the government.

Under these conditions, further aggravated by the pandemic and humanitarian crisis, Venezuela’s dictatorship will hold the so-called parliamentary elections this upcoming 6th of December (6D). A new criminal attack the Transnational Organized Crime or 21st Century Socialism’s group will perpetrate to destroy the National Assembly, and the renowned and legitimate President of Venezuela. It is only a repeat of similar crimes that have been committed this century, crimes that have now been so institutionalized they appear to be normal, crimes that have “functional oppositions” and “international observers” as an essential component.

The re-incidence of “voting under dictatorships” and the impunity granted by “vote-catching dictatorships” to those enablers breaking the law is mind-boggling. It just happened in Bolivia on the 18th of October, it will happen on 6 December in Venezuela, there are threats that it may happen on 7 February of 2021 in Ecuador whose electoral and judicial infrastructure remains Castrochavist, and undoubtedly will happen again next November in Nicaragua. These governments commit the crimes, repeat them, and continue holding power with international recognition.

Part of the Castrochavist strategy is to treat each case as an isolated case of voting under a dictatorship. In Bolivia they already committed fraud and reinstated the “Dictator-In Chief” Evo Morales with his executive Luis Arce and now this will be overshadowed by the importance and new criminal scandal of holding parliamentary elections on 6 December in Venezuela. Treat each case as an isolated case when, truthfully, this is about the same Transnational Organized Crime group, committing the same crimes, with the same objectives and with the same weapons, all while they increase persecutions, assassinations, political prisoners and exiles.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators Association, ATA # 234680.