Elections in Venezuela
Elections in Venezuela are held at a national level for the President of Venezuela as head of state and head of government, and for a unicameral legislature. The President is elected for a six-year term by direct election plurality voting and is eligible for re-election. The National Assembly has 277 members, elected for five-year terms using a mixed-member majoritarian representation system. Elections also take place at state level and local level.
Since 1998, elections in Venezuela have been automated, and administered by the National Electoral Council. The voting age is 18, and 95% of eligible voters are legally registered.
Prior to the early 1990s, Venezuela was considered an unusually long-standing and stable liberal democracy in Latin America, having transitioned to democracy in 1958. After the victory of socialist populist Hugo Chávez in the 1998 presidential election, Venezuela gradually underwent democratic backsliding before transitioning to an authoritarian system of government where political and civil rights are not protected, and elections are not free and fair. Under Chávez's rule and later under the rule of his successor Nicolás Maduro, power has been concentrated in the hands of the executive, institutional checks and balances have been undermined, independent media have been repressed, and opposition forces have been marginalized in governing institutions, such as congress, courts, oversight agencies, the state-owned petroleum company, and the military.
Politics are polarized between supporters of President Nicolás Maduro, organized as the United Socialist Party and the Great Patriotic Pole, and several opposition parties. Opposition parties and opposition candidates have regularly been banned from contesting elections. At other times, opposition parties have boycotted national elections, citing their undemocratic nature. Venezuela was ranked the third least electoral democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean according to V-Dem Democracy indices in 2023 with a score of 0.214 out of one.
Result
2000 Venezuelan parliamentary election
2020 Venezuelan parliamentary election
History
1811–1889: First congress and presidents
On 18 April 1810, agents of the Spanish Regency arrived in the city of Caracas. After considerable political tumult, the local nobility announced an extraordinary open hearing of the cabildo on 19 April. On that day, an expanded municipal government of Caracas took power in the name of Ferdinand VII, calling itself The Supreme Junta to Preserve the Rights of Ferdinand VII. The Caracas Junta called for the convention of a congress of the Venezuelan provinces which began meeting the following March, at which time the Junta dissolved itself. Francisco de Miranda was elected to the Congress and began agitating for independence.File:Juan Lovera 2012 007.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Cristóbal Mendoza, first president of the First Republic of Venezuela, took office on July 5, 1811. All three initial presidents had been signatories on the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence.
In March 1811 during the Spanish American wars of independence, the first Venezuelan constitutional congress established the executive power a triumvirate in which three men shared executive power and rotated the presidency every week. Cristóbal Mendoza became a member of the triumvirate that headed the First Republic of Venezuela and was unanimously elected by the other two as the first to go in rotation on 5 March 1811. Mendoza was author of the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence, formally issued on 5 July 1811, on which date the presidential designation also took effect. The first Constitution of the Republic of Venezuela was designed in December 1811. The Congress established a Confederation called the United States of Venezuela in the Constitution, crafted mostly by lawyer Juan Germán Roscio, that it ratified on 21 December 1811. The Constitution created a strong bicameral legislature and, as also happened in neighboring New Granada, the Congress kept the weak executive consisting of a triumvirate.
A second triumvirate followed on April 3, 1812. The presidency was disestablished in 1813, when Simon Bolivar established the Third Republic of Venezuela. In 1830, José Antonio Páez declared Venezuela independent from Gran Colombia and became president, taking office on January 13, 1830. Presidents of Venezuela who served under the 1864 constitution bore the title of "President of the Union", instead of the usual "President of the Republic" still used today. Aside from that, all heads of state of the country since 1811 have held the title of "President of Venezuela."
According to Raul L. Madrid, the first free and fair elections in Venezuela was the 1834 Venezuelan presidential election, which was won by José María Vargas.
1900–1989: First democratic elections
was a period in Venezuelan history from 1945 to 1948 under the government of Democratic Action, a party which gained office via the 1945 Venezuelan coup d'état against President Isaías Medina Angarita of the two-year-old Venezuelan Democratic Party. El Trienio Adeco saw the first democratic elections in Venezuelan history, beginning with the Constituent Assembly elections held in Venezuela on 27 October 1946, Democratic Action, which won 137 of the 160 seats in the Assembly. Voter turnout was 86.6%.General elections held in Venezuela on 14 December 1947 are described as the first honest elections in Venezuela. At the time, there were 110 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 46 seats in the Senate, with Democratic Action winning a majority of both.
The 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état took place on 24 November 1948, when elected president Rómulo Gallegos was overthrown a year after his election. Democracy would not be restored until the 1958 Venezuelan coup d'état overthrew the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
A referendum on the presidential term and national and regional governors was held on 15 December 1957, resulting in the referendum's approval. Voters were asked whether they approved of President Marcos Pérez Jiménez remaining in power without fresh elections, and appointing government nominees as members of the national parliament, regional assemblies and local councils. The referendum was held under non-democratic conditions. Jiménez was overthrown the following year.
In the 7 December 1958 general elections, voter turnout was recorded at 94.4% in the presidential election and 92.1% in the Congressional elections. Democratic Action again swept the elections, winning the presidency and two majorities.
1990–1999: Later constitutions
The 1998 presidential election was the first to be carried out with a new National Electoral Council. Traditionally poll workers had been provided by the parties, but in this election "a lottery was set up to draft 300,000 registered voters as poll workers". The elections also saw "the world's first automated voting system, which featured a single integrated electronic network that was supposed to transmit the results from the polling stations to central headquarters within minutes." The automated vote system enabled the Electoral Council to announce the results within 2.5 hours of the polls closing. After corroborating the results with the Carter Center, the losing candidate conceded several hours later. In the 1998 presidential elections, one of candidate Hugo Chávez's electoral promises was to organize a referendum asking the people if they wanted to convene a National Constituent Assembly. His first decree as president was thus to order such a referendum, which took place on 19 April. The electorate were asked two questionswhether a constituent assembly should be convened, and whether it should follow the mechanisms proposed by the president. The 1998 parliamentary elections were on 8 November 1998. There were 207 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 54 seats in the Senate.Under the new Bolivarian 1999 Constitution, the legislative branch of Government in Venezuela is represented by a unicameral National Assembly. The Assembly is made up of 165 deputies , who are elected by "universal, direct, personal, and secret" vote on a national party-list proportional representation system. In addition, three deputies are returned on a state-by-state basis, and three seats were reserved for representatives of Venezuela's indigenous peoples. All deputies serve five-year terms. In 1999 a two-term limit of six years each was established for the President of Venezuela.
2000–present: Recent elections
In 2007 the leading Fifth Republic Movement party dissolved and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela formed as the leading government party. On 15 August 2007, PSUV founder and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez proposed an amendment to 33 articles of Venezuela's 350-article Constitution. Chávez stated that the proposed constitutional reforms were needed to complete the transition to a socialist republic and to implement his Bolivarian Revolution. The proposal was narrowly defeated by 51 to 49 percent. In 2009 a constitutional referendum resulted in the abolition of term limits for the office of President of Venezuela.The 2010 parliamentary elections took place on 26 September 2010 to elect the 165 deputies to the National Assembly. Venezuelan opposition parties participated in the election through the Coalition for Democratic Unity.
The National Electoral council scheduled regional elections for 16 December 2012 to elect state governors and state legislators, with PSUV winning the governorships of 20 of the 23 states. Voter turnout was 53%.
New versions of the Basic Law of Electoral Processes were issued by the CNE on 7 June 2012 and 18 January 2013.
Venezuela's municipal elections were delayed from their intended date of 14 April 2013 after the death of President Hugo Chávez on 5 March 2013, as a new presidential election was also scheduled for 14 April. Winning the vote by a narrow margin, Nicolás Maduro was sworn in as the new president on 19 April 2013. After around an eight-month delay, municipal elections on December 8, 2013, elected 337 mayors and 2,455 local councillors for their respective 2013–2017 terms.
The parliamentary elections in 2015 took place on 6 December 2015 to elect the 164 deputies and three indigenous representatives of the National Assembly. The result was a decisive defeat for the ruling PSUV, which lost control of the Assembly for the first time since 1999. The Democratic Unity Roundtable won the majority of seats.
A week after the 2015 parliamentary elections, the outgoing National Assembly created the "National Communal Parliament", with President Maduro stating "All power to the Communal parliament". The move was described by Janes Information Services as an attempt "to sideline and leapfrog the incoming opposition-controlled National Assembly". The process to hold a Venezuelan recall referendum to vote on recalling Maduro started on 2 May 2016. In July 2016, the Venezuelan government stated that if enough signatures were collected in the second petition stage, a recall vote would be held no sooner than 2017. However, the government cancelled the recall movement on 21 October 2017, with conventional media describing President Maduro as a dictator following the suspension of movement.
After Venezuela entered into a constitutional crisis when the Supreme Tribunal removed power from the National Assembly, months of protests occurred in 2017, resulting in President Maduro calling for the rewriting of the constitution. The 2017 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly election took place, electing all pro-Maduro candidates to the Constituent Assembly of Venezuela, removing power from the National Assembly once again. In December 2020, the Venezuelan Constitutional Assembly was dismantled without presenting a draft for the new constitution.
On July 28, 2024, presidential elections were held for the term of 2025 - 2031, where the incumbent President, Nicolas Maduro, ran against Edmundo González. The result of the election became contested as the government claimed Nicolas Maduro won with 51.90% of the vote. However, international organizations including the Carter center and the United Nations contested this claim as being false and filled with irregularities. On the other hand, the opposition published the detailed electoral results in the form of scanned copies of the tally sheets on the website resultadospresidencialesvenezuela2024.com The opposition was able to obtain 83.50% of the reported tallies, showing that the candidate Edmundo González Urrutia won with 67.08% of the votes.