Latin America: Venezuela’s election on Sunday, which saw bus driver Nicolas Maduro declared the winner by a razor-thin margin, reeked of electoral fraud. Kudos to challenger Henrique Capriles for calling it out.

Fraud is a strong word but, yes, it’s the clearest conclusion from Venezuela’s election Sunday to pick a successor to the late socialist dictator Hugo Chavez.

Chavez’s hand-picked successor “won” Venezuela’s election Sunday, with what Chavez’s anything-but impartial CNE electoral body declaring he’d gotten 50.6% of the vote, while his challenger, Miranda state governor Henrique Capriles Radonski garnered 49.07% — a gap of just 235,000 votes. That’s suspicious right there, given the structural advantages and Chavez “sympathy votes” Maduro had yet couldn’t turn into a victory.

Polls — every one of them — showed that Capriles had crossed over to a tie or lead in the last week of the campaign, while the size of his spirited million-strong rallies — the largest since 2002 — told the same story.

Capriles says he had enough evidence amid a stream of down-ballot irregularities — from Chavista motorcycle goons intimidating voters to ballot boxes strewn across the Barinas state — to believe he had won.

Yet Maduro, a wooden candidate almost totally lacking in charisma, somehow was the people’s choice.

His angry victory speech threatening voters was an odd thing, given his razor-thin margin of victory and presumed need to unify the country to govern.

Obviously, he was trying to hold together his base, which in fact is crumbling as his Chavista political rivals now call for “self criticism.” That’s not a good sign.

What’s more he wasn’t able to buy votes this time. Banker Russ Dallen of BBO Financial Services in Caracas points out that amid the shambles of Venezuela’s public finances, Maduro didn’t even have cash to dole out goodies to buy votes.

Perhaps the biggest reality that can’t be ignored is that Chavez’s, and by extension Maduro’s, socialist record is one of massive failure.

Venezuela, with the world’s largest oil reserves, is deeply in debt, has 30% inflation, repeated currency devaluations, empty store shelves, capital controls, crumbling infrastructure, and the world’s worst crime and corruption.

The only place we’ve seen comparable results has been in Mexico during the PRI “perfect dictatorship” era of Mario Vargas Llosa’s description, where a losing candidate in a stacked election would win by a small margin instead of a big one to preserve credibility.

As we go to press, tanks have been dispatched to the streets of the middle-class district of Altimira in the capital, a sign of the instability that comes of an election with zero credibility that couldn’t even be disguised by Chavez’s corrupt Chicago-style political machine.

Capriles has called for a recount and the White House, to its credit, has asked for an audit. They’re unlikely to happen, given that the game of the Chavista machine is to hold on to power at any price.

They’ll hold onto power with military tanks as the facade of Venezuelan democracy crumbles.

Source: Investors.com