On the Road to Caracas?
On July 28, Venezuela held its presidential election. Exit polling showed that Edmundo Gonzalez, a previously unknown 74-year-old opposition candidate, had won a landslide victory with approximately two-thirds of the vote. The next day, however, the National Electoral Council (NEC)—a body that oversees national elections and that is loyal to dictator Nicolas Maduro—declared Maduro the winner by a 51%-44% margin.
Many world leaders—including Argentinian President Javier Milei, Chilean President Gabriel Boric, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken—have expressed profound skepticism. The NEC is refusing to release the tally sheets from the country’s electronic voting machines. Gonzalez claims that his party has obtained approximately 70% of the tally sheets, and they show that he achieved a landslide victory that would be mathematically impossible to overcome.
Gonzalez’s candidacy illustrates just how corrupt Venezuela’s election system is. The leader of the opposition, Maria Corina Machado, had sought to run against Maduro. Venezuela’s Supreme Court then intervened, ruling that Machado could not run for fifteen years. The Supreme Court is nothing more than a Maduro puppet that rubber stamps the dictator’s desires.
Undeterred, Machado indicated that Corina Yoris, a college professor, would run for the presidency. The NEC then stepped in and declared Yoris ineligible. In addition to the NEC, Maduro has entrenched loyalists in local positions where vote counting occurs. In defiance of this malfeasance, Gonzalez, a political newcomer and ally of Machado’s, achieved a landslide victory.
If Maduro’s tactics are beginning to sound familiar, he also has not hesitated in using Venezuela’s legal system to go after his political opponents. Nearly a dozen of Machado’s campaign staff, including her campaign manager, are facing charges for a supposed anti-government conspiracy in which they engaged. The Maduro regime has issued warrants for their arrests, but the staffers have taken refuge in the Argentinian Embassy.
Maduro has expelled the Argentines and other Latin American delegations, however, as they have questioned the election results. It is unclear what fate will befall Machado’s staffers if they leave the Embassy. This catastrophe was entirely foreseeable. President Joe Biden lifted sanctions on Venezuelan oil that the Trump administration had imposed. In exchange, Maduro pledged to implement democratic reforms. We now see how that turned out.
Here at home, the United States has an upcoming election that is expected to end closely; no candidate will come anywhere near two-thirds of the vote. Legitimate security and integrity concerns, however, certainly exist. Some states mail ballots to voters even when voters have not requested them. Because people regularly move, ballots easily can wind up at an incorrect address.
A stranger could receive a ballot, vote, and the real voter could be none the wiser until, perhaps, it is too late. Our citizenship verification system for voting is also lax. A registrant simply needs to check a form box that they are a citizen, and voila: they are registered to vote. Democrats in Congress vehemently oppose the SAVE Act, a measure that would implement stronger safeguards to ensure that only American citizens vote in federal elections.
President Donald Trump reminds us of Machado. Several leftist courts, including the Colorado Supreme Court, disqualified Trump from the presidential ballot. Their rationale involved Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, the so-called Insurrection Clause. These courts declared Trump an insurrectionist based on his constitutionally-protected speech. Trump faces no charge of insurrection, much less has a court convicted him of it. These courts, however, waved a magic wand, declared him an insurrectionist, and struck him from the ballot.
Fortunately for Trump and the rule of law, one rational court remains: the Supreme Court of the United States. In March, the justices unanimously restored Trump to the ballot and held that states have no authority to remove a presidential candidate under the Insurrection Clause. This ruling also put a stop to leftists’ efforts to disqualify many of Trump’s allies, such as U.S. House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who they sought to throw off of the ballot since 2022. This particular effort to derail Trump failed, but there are many others that continue.
Two local Democrat prosecutors—Alvin Bragg in Manhattan and Fani Willis in Atlanta—have indicted Trump based upon absurd legal theories. Willis claims that Trump’s lawful efforts to contest the 2020 election amount to a violation of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law. Bragg’s case is even more preposterous, claiming that a settlement of a common nuisance claim after the 2016 election constituted a conspiracy to interfere in that election by keeping a common, non-disclosed business transaction from the eyes of voters.
The strongest connection to the federal Executive Branch, which President Biden heads, is in the form of two indictments by Special Counsel Jack Smith, an appointee of Biden’s hand-picked lawman Attorney General Merrick Garland. In the District of Columbia, Smith has brought charges against Trump similar to Willis’s RICO case. Smith also has indicted Trump in Florida for the legal retention of copies of records that Trump declassified during his presidency.
The Supreme Court has stood in the way of the anti-Trump lawfare. In addition to the Insurrection Clause ruling, the justices recently held Trump, and every president, has absolute immunity for core official acts during his presidency and that he is at least presumptively immune for all other official acts. President Biden was so outraged by this ruling that he has proposed a constitutional amendment to clarify that presidents do not have immunity. He does not seem to realize that this ruling protects him from prosecution by a future Trump-led Justice Department. Biden also has advocated in favor of term limits for justices, citing presidential term limits.
Presidential term limits were put in place following the presidency of the last president to attempt to drastically alter the court, FDR, through the Twenty-Second Amendment; however, Biden’s Supreme Court term limits proposal is not specific. He has not clarified whether it involves a constitutional or statutory change. He also has not mentioned term limits for members of the Legislative Branch in which he served for six terms (over 36 years) as a senator. In short, Biden is attempting to neutralize the Supreme Court, the only impediment to the anti-Trump lawfare. Moreover, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ presidential nominee, has stated that she is open to packing the Court; that is, she is open to adding leftist justices to rubber stamp a progressive agenda just like FDR attempted to do. These new additions would no doubt rubber-stamp the lawfare against Trump and his associates, many of whom also face charges in various jurisdictions.
The international community condemned Maduro’s thuggish tactics. Yet, this same community and, far more disturbingly, many Americans not only remain silent on similar tactics deployed against President Trump; instead, many cheer this lawfare. The goal is simple: get Trump. The means do not matter. Throw him off of the ballot. Indict him and his supporters. Provide him with less than adequate security at his rallies, resulting in his near-assassination. Even an attempt to defund his Secret Service protection, as nine House Democrats have done through a piece of legislation that, even after the attempted assassination on July 13, they disgracefully have not withdrawn. Maduro would seem to fit in quite well within the Democrats’ new political system.
Mike Davis is the Founder and President of Article III Project.