Caracas Chronicles

This is the single worst thing that could’ve happened: CNE has announced Maduro won the election by 7.51 million votes to 7.27 million for Capriles, but the opposition may well be sitting on clear evidence that this is not true. What comes next is a deep governability crisis.

Henrique Capriles’s job now is to avoid becoming a López Obrador figure.

The silver lining is that the problem now is one of evidence, not rhetoric. CNE will have to release its detailed central tally. If that tally doesn’t match the machine-by-machine and/or the paper ballot handcount tallies (the actas de auditoría), that’ll be basically impossible to hide.

Triple congruence is the strength of the CNE system. If there’s a breakdown in it, we’ll be able to tell.

Here’s a little refresher course on why:

The point: all three sets of tallies are public. If they don’t match, everyone will be able to see they don’t match. It may be that they don’t care that they don’t match, but they won’t be able to hide it if they don’t match.