Machado wins primary vote of Venezuelan opposition, expected to face Maduro in election

Conservative Maria Corina Machado was chosen as the candidate of the Venezuelan opposition to face President Nicolas Maduro next year, winning nine out of ten votes on Sunday in a primary election that exceeded organizers’ expectations for turnout.

Machado, 56, won the race with 93% of the votes, officials at the opposition’s National Primary Commission announced at midnight after counting 26% of the vote. The numbers were released after a long delay which organizers and opposition leaders claimed was caused after the computers used to gather information from voting centers were hacked.

The commission is expected to update the numbers throughout Monday, as the tallying of the votes continued, but said the trend was irreversible. Most of Machado’s other nine rivals in the primary who were in the low single digits conceded.

“From tonight we begin a great movement for a great national alliance for the transformation of Venezuela,” Machado said after she was declared the winner. “Today I received a mandate and I accept with Venezuelans the commitment of making that mandate matter.”

Machado, an industrial engineer known for her stern criticism of the Maduro regime’s socialist revolution, faces a difficult road ahead given that the Maduro government has banned her from holding public office.

In secret meetings held this year between representatives of the Biden administration and the Maduro regime, Caracas agreed to allow the opposition to choose its own candidate for the presidential election to be held in the second half of 2024, sources from the Venezuelan opposition told the Miami Herald last week.

But Machado’s potential participation was a major point of disruption in the negotiations held between the opposition and the regime last week in Barbados and almost prevented the parties from signing a deal that contains commitments from Maduro’s government to reform the electoral system.

READ MORE: U.S. lifts sanctions on Venezuelan oil and gold after Maduro deal with opposition

Officials in Washington later told reporters that it was the administration’s understanding that Maduro will allow Machado to run. However, the regime has yet to make an official pronouncement saying so.

Voters’ participation in the open primary exceeded the expectations of organizers, who feared that the regime’s efforts to discourage the vote — by limiting fuel sales, maintaining a news media blackout and threatening volunteers and potential voters with arrests and other forms of reprisals — would keep voters at home, according to opposition leaders and reports coming out of Venezuelan online TV channel, VPI TV.

While being described as a tsunami by opposition leaders, the overall number of votes is likely to add up to less than 4 million, only a fraction of the 22 million Venezuelans registered to vote.

The opposition says this is due to a series of factors, including that nearly 4 million of pro-opposition voters are now in exile and that the regime’s overall control of the press inside Venezuela kept voters uninformed about the electoral process.

Participation still surpassed organizers’ calculation, and some of the voting centers ran out of supplies, causing further delays on Sunday.

Polls had predicted that Machado would easily win the election over her rivals: Carlos Prosperi (Democratic Action), Andrés Caleca (Movement for Venezuela), Tamara Adrián (United for Dignity), Delsa Solórzano (Citizen Encounter), Andrés Velásquez (Radical Cause), César Pérez Vivas (Citizen Concertation), César Almeida (Popular Political Unit 89), Gloria Pinho (Por Tí Venezuela) and Luis Farías (Independent Merideños Progressives).

A recent survey by independent polling firm Meganalisis showed the opposition would win with 54% compared to 11% for Maduro.

Voters used a pen to mark their choice on a paper ballot with an X instead of using the electronic machines normally used in elections organized by the regime. This was because the process was carried out without the help of the National Electoral Council which is controlled by the Maduro regime.

Being organized with the scarce resources of the opposition, the process had fewer voting centers than normally seen during Venezuelan elections. It also lacked access to public buildings, such as schools, as locations for voting and had very limited funds to buy voting material such as paper ballots and pens. The vote was further affected by an acute fuel shortage that severely limited voter movement.

Election next year

Machado is expected to face Maduro next year in elections that are expected to have more fair and transparent conditions following the agreement signed last week under the mediation of the United States.

In that agreement signed in Barbados, Maduro committed to carrying out major reforms of the electoral system and allowing the elections to be monitored by the international community.

The reforms include the audit of the electoral registry, which has been suspected for years by the opposition of including millions of people who do not exist and are used by the regime to inflate the vote in its favor.

The commitments also include the adoption of measures to make it easier for the more than 3.5 million voters who are abroad to also vote.

Among the voters on Sunday were thousands of Venezuelans residing in South Florida who went to Miami Dade College in Doral to vote in the opposition primaries, many of them hopeful that the vote will ultimately lead to a democratic transition in the South American country.

More than 35,000 people were registered to vote in Miami, where the largest voting center in the United States was established.

Oscar López, coordinator of the Miami Primary Organizing Committee, had urged all registered Venezuelan voters to participate in the process, citing hardships caused by the Caracas Socialist regime.

“Do it for your son who was killed by crime, or who was killed in a march protesting the regime, or for the Venezuelan who died because he did not have an electric fan to combat the heat, or for the uncle or the grandmother who died because they could not find an antibiotic,” López said. “For all those people who are now dead and for those who are imprisoned unjustly and for those who are starving, you have to come out and vote.”