With Venezuelaâs political opposition â and much of the rest of the world â accusing the countryâs authoritarian regime of voter mega-fraud in Sunday's presidential election, expats here in South Florida want to ramp up their alert to the U.S. and the Biden Administration.
In Doral, Venezuelan expat leaders entered a media briefing shouting âHasta el Final!â or âTo the End!â â to emphasize, they say, that they and the opposition wonât back down until Venezuelan President NicolĂĄs Maduro gives up his questionable claim that he defeated challenger Edmundo GonzĂĄlez.
Many inside and outside Venezuela believe the regime massively falsified the vote count after credible exit polls Sunday showed Maduro losing to GonzĂĄlez by a landslide.
Those quick counts had GonzĂĄlez up by more than 30 percentage points â a reflection of earlier voter polls that showed him leading the intensely unpopular Maduro by wide margins, and of the sea of supporters that greeted him and Machado at campaign rallies across Venezuela.
Yet the regime's electoral authority, the CNE, announced late Sunday night that Maduro had won with 51% of the vote to GonzĂĄlez's 44%. Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 and was seeking a third six-year term, declared victory and called it a "vote for peace" in Venezuela. (His 2018 re-election was also heavily stained by election fraud.)
The credibility of the CNE's count was further undermined by several other factors â not the least of which was that its seemingly sloppy and fabricated tally math, which included several other candidates on the ballot, added up to an impossible 132%.
What's more, as of Monday afternoon, the opposition and the international community said they had only been given access to half the country's voter precinct tally sheets, known as actas.
As a result, GonzĂĄlez too declared victory, calling the regime's conduct of the vote count "a violation of all [electoral] norms." At the same time, the streets of Venezuela's capital, Caracas, began to fill up with protesters marching against what they called vote-stealing.
READ MORE: Venezuela's massive diaspora can't vote â but it's still firing up voters
Maria Teresa Morin, an expat spokesperson in Florida for opposition leader MarĂa Corina Machado â whom Maduro had barred from running against him because of her broad popularity â said expats here and around the world mean to ramp up their role as election monitors since the regime effectively barred them from voting.
âWe are helping our brothers in Venezuela to exercise their rights," Morin said. "All the world knows what happened yesterday in Venezuela â and the message is: Theyâre not going to get away with it.â
In the run-up to Sunday's election, Morin and other expats had helped Venezuelans inside the country organize voter activism cells called "comanditos," or "little command centers," throughout the country. One of the comanditos' chief roles was to monitor the polling stations â something expat volunteers were helping with via laptop computers on Sunday at JosĂ© MartĂ Park in Miami.
As the day wore on, those expat volunteers could see the regime's attempts to block opposition poll watchers from monitoring the vote.
"The big fear is that, of course, the will of the Venezuelan people is not going to be recognized," Maria Alejandra Marquez, another expat opposition spokesperson, told WLRN as she helped coordinate the volunteers at José Martà Park.
"But we knew this was a possibility. No one here was fooling themselves thinking that this was going to be easy, or this was going to be a fair election."
Marquez noted that Maduro and his autocratic socialist revolution had made it clear they were loath to ever give up power, even though they're widely blamed for human rights abuses and a severe humanitarian crisis â the worst in modern South American history â that's driven almost 8 million Venezuelans to flee their country in the past decade.
"People just realized that, OK, this is a reality we have â because at the end, they [the regime] have the ⊠the power of the weapons," meaning the support of Venezuela's military.
Expat Mari Olivieri, a paralegal from Weston, echoed Marquez's concerns in a WhatsApp call with WLRN on Sunday after she voted in Caracas â one of the few exiles permitted to travel to Venezuela to cast a ballot.
"When we went out to vote in the morning, people were very authentic, like, âI want to vote.â It was the only thing they were thinking in the morning â no coffee, no breakfast, we just want to vote and make Venezuela free again," Olivieri said.
"But my fear is, once they start counting the votes, they stole the election. So how to defend our votes if they have the guns and the tanks?â
Morin told WLRN sheâs confident Maduro will give in to demands by the U.S. and other nations, especially in Latin America and Europe, to release a more transparent, precinct-by-precinct vote tally â and ultimately concede the election.
âI think he is feeling enough [international] pressure," Morin said. "Itâs growing since last night. They are rethinking their huge fraud.â
So far, though, neither Maduro nor the Venezuelan military that keeps him in power has indicated any such second thoughts.
Meanwhile, millions more Venezuelans inside the country have told pollsters they too intend to emigrate â and put more pressure on the U.S. southern border â if Maduro remains in power.
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