Today, President Nicolás Maduro will take the oath of office for his third consecutive term. The autocrat brazenly stole Venezuela’s presidential election last July; the country’s free, fair, and transparent voting system proved it. Yet, despite his clear defeat, Maduro declared himself victorious and unleashed a punishing crackdown on his opponents.
In the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, Javier Corrales and Dorothy Kronick explain how this came to pass, and why an autocrat would want to maintain one of the world’s best voting systems in the first place.
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Image Credit: Marcelo Garcia via Wikimedia Commons