I come for a civil discussion. Sorry, my question is a bit complicated.

Note: I am not asking people to argue whether Maduro is a dictator or not. You are free to do so and I will engage, but that’s not my main question.

What I’m asking is, how come most people, especially uninformed people or those who know very little about Venezuela, call Maduro a dictator? Even well-meaning critics of the abduction?

I’m not looking for “well they’re uninformed” answer. I am, sincerely curious how such an opinion is so, widespread?

I would expect uninformed people to take a simplistic, reductive approach of “well there were elections so I guess he can’t be a dictator”. That is assuming they speak on the matter at all.

A simplistic, surface level investigation reveals: there were elections. They were internationally monitored. Highly automated voting system. Etc. It would also reveal they’re challenged by international community, but I imagined most people would be skeptical of that.

I am not denying the presence of arguments against the validity of the elections, but none those arguments are the result of surface level investigation.

What are your thoughts?

  • balderdash@lemmy.zipEnglish
    7·
    2 months ago

    then ran elections that had results very different from the results of polls prior to the election

    I’m not an expert on Venezuela, but I do want to note that the exact same thing happened for Trump’s first presidency. All the polls said Hillary Clinton would win.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      Yeah but even in the US, polls had Trump getting more than 16% of the vote.

      And there were watchers polling people about who they voted for as they left voting booths, and the results showed the main opposition candidate winning by a landslide. Plus the whole thing where the Manduro government said he won by a close margin but didn’t release tabulated results so it was just “trust me, I won”.

      • matcha_addict@lemy.lolOPEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Results were released. Not sure what you mean by tabulated, but I assume you’re repeating the talking point about the tallies, which are the tallies from the individual polling stations. Those were also released. But the criticism was that the government announced the results before releasing those individual polling station tallies, citing technical problems.

    • Sidyctism II.@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      Not an expert either, just the first numbers i found: the us polls had a 2-5% lead for clinton. And they were (basically) correct. Clinton won the popular vote by a 2% margin. Thats on the lower end of the estimate, but i dont see a reason to assume some (widespread) fraud from this.

      From this guardian article, it seems in venezuela, the numbers were wildly different

      About four hours after voting ended, the government-controlled national electoral council declared victory for Maduro, eventually saying that the strongman leader had won nearly 52% of the vote to González’s 43%.

      But thousands of opposition volunteers had managed to collect about 80% of the voting tallies from polling stations, which showed a clear victory for González, with 67% over Maduro’s 30%. Two different independent analyses, from the AP and the Washington Post, reached similar conclusions.

      Note that they arent speaking of polls, but the actual voting tallies of the election. If these are indeed the real tallies, there couldnt be such a wide margin of difference