Of all the different scenarios in Venezuela’s election on Sunday, we witnessed the most likely one: Nicolas Maduro was announced as the winner of the vote by the country’s electoral authority controlled by the authoritarian president’s close allies.
Shortly past midnight in Caracas, the National Electoral Council said that Maduro got 51% of the vote compared with 44% for rival Edmundo Gonzalez, despite polls showing the opposition candidate clearly ahead by double-digit margins.
The electoral body didn’t produce the individual tallies from each voting station to support such result after saying it received a "terrorist” attack on its transmission systems. How inconvenient! It also called the result "irreversible” even if 20% of the votes were still uncounted and the difference between both candidates was just 7 percentage points.