Venezuela and the Consequences of Shoddy Electoral Observation

If the absence of protests or conflict on an election day is an indicator of success, then the success of the Union of South American Nations’ (UNASUR’s) election “accompaniment" of Venezuela’s December 6th legislative elections was smashing.

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  • Christopher Sabatini

    Dr. Christopher Sabatini, is a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, and was formerly a lecturer in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Chris is also on the advisory boards of Harvard University’s LASPAU, the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch's Americas Division, and of the Inter-American Foundation. He is also an HFX Fellow at the Halifax International Security Forum. He is a frequent contributor to policy journals and newspapers and appears in the media and on panels on issues related to Latin America and foreign policy. Chris has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2015, Chris founded and directed a new research non-profit, Global Americas and edited its news and opinion website. From 2005 to 2014 Chris was senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the hemispheric policy magazine Americas Quarterly (AQ). At the AS/COA, Dr. Sabatini chaired the organization’s rule of law and Cuba working groups. Prior to that, he was director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a diplomacy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, working at the US Agency for International Development’s Center for Democracy and Governance. He provides regular interviews for major media outlets, and has a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia.

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If the absence of protests or conflict on an election day is an indicator of success, then the success of the Union of South American Nations’ (UNASUR’s) election “accompaniment” of Venezuela’s December 6th legislative elections was smashing. But recent events demonstrate the folly of limiting election observation to a few days before the event and defining observation, as UNASUR does in its charter, as sanctioning the electoral process by “accompanying” the state election authority—making a mockery of international election observation standards.

Despite a litany of complaints about the pre-electoral conditions from credible outsiders, including Secretary General Luis Almagro of the Organization of American States (OAS), the unified opposition managed to win a two-thirds supermajority of 112 seats in the 167-seat unicameral National Assembly, handing the Chavista government its first ever major electoral defeat. Now, though, President Nicolas Maduro’s government has begun attempts to shrink the majority of the incoming opposition bloc. And the price of UNASUR’s toothless, election-day “accompaniment” of the elections is now becoming evident.

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