Venezuelan dictator pulls new trick to steal election. Here’s what Biden must do | Opinion

Just when it seemed that Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro had pulled all the tricks to steal the July 28 elections, he has come up with a new scheme to avert an opposition victory: making it almost impossible for millions of Venezuelan exiles to vote.

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country in recent years, most of them fleeing from an economic debacle and political repression. And, according to a new study by three Venezuelan non-government-organizations, most exiles are unable to register in Venezuelan consulates abroad.

The three groups — Alert Venezuela, Public Space and Young Vote — say that 5 million of the nearly 8 million Venezuelan exiles are entitled to vote. But the Maduro regime has made it almost impossible for them to register in foreign consulates, they say.

An additional 4 million people living in Venezuela are unable to register to vote, because they have changed their addresses or are new voters who are not being told where or how to complete their voting credentials, the groups’ report says.

“This means that 25% of all eligible voters, or one in four, won’t be allowed to vote,” Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez told me in an interview this week. “The regime has opened the electoral registration process, and only 69,000 people were able to register.”

There is no Venezuelan consulate in South Florida, where most of the estimated 500,000 Venezuelans in the United Sates live, nor anywhere else in the country. The Maduro regime broke ties with Washington in 2019.

In some countries that have Venezuelan consulates, like Spain, Venezuelan diplomatic missions have only one employee to take care of people wanting to register to vote. The lines are so long, that many potential voters gave up and left. And the deadline for voting registration has already passed, Venezuelan opposition sources say.

Before this latest scheme to avoid an opposition victory, the Maduro regime had banned opposition leader Maria Corina Machado from running for president. Machado had won a massively-attended opposition primary in October with about 92% of the vote.

When Machado appointed 80-year-old university professor Corina Yoris to run for president in her place, the Maduro regime banned Yoris. Machado and the biggest Venezuelan opposition parties now support 74-year-old retired diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia as their candidate.

Despite the regime’s fraudulent election process, Lopez told me he’s confident that the united opposition ticket will win the elections. “The people want change, like never before,” he told me.

An April 29 poll by Venezuela’s Meganalisis firm shows that 32% of voters support Gonzalez Urrutia, while only 11% say they support Maduro. Other polls cited by opposition leaders say that nearly 80% of voters support the opposition candidate.

Lopez’s main concern is that Maduro will suspend the elections, using an excuse such as a fabricated border conflict with neighboring Guyana, for fear of losing. It’s speculation that I’m also hearing increasingly in U.S. and Latin American diplomatic circles.

President Biden deserves credit for recently re-imposing oil sanctions on Venezuela he had temporarily lifted to give Maduro a chance to organize a fair election. But now, it’s time for Biden to personally denounce Maduro’s sham elections, instead of leaving that job mostly to his underlings.

Biden should come to Miami, visit a Venezuelan arepas eatery and call for a fair election in Venezuela. In addition, he should instruct Secretary of State Antony Blinken to visit Brazil and Colombia, and ask their democratically-elected leftist leaders to — alongside other Latin American countries — convince Maduro to allow a fair election.

It’s in everybody’s interest to seek fair elections in Venezuela, considering that a fraudulent Maduro re-election could drive millions more Venezuelans to flee abroad. Maduro’s latest moves show that he’s willing to use any imaginable trick to stay in power.

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