JM—The executive summary of the declassified memorandum states that, while the U.S. intelligence community maintained ongoing observation and “persistent concerns” about the electronic voting system infrastructure in Venezuela between 2004 and 2020, the agency concludes that “large-scale electronic fraud has not been definitively confirmed in specific Venezuelan elections.”
For US intelligence, the technological fetish of hacking loses weight in the face of the country’s sociopolitical reality. The CIA’s baseline assessment maintains that “there are other factors that better explain the election results.” In the technical jargon of US analysts, this formulation implicitly acknowledges that Chavismo’s victories over the last two decades are truly explained by the organic cohesion of its social base and the historical fragmentation of the opposition forces, and not by hidden manipulation of the voting screens.
