“We haven’t seen anything like this,” said Staffan Darnolf of the International Foundation for Election Systems, a group outside Washington that advises more than 30 countries on election operations.
The design of the ballot, he added, appears to give Maduro a clear advantage.
“It’s an advantage to be at the top of a ballot, because that’s usually what people are looking at,” he said.
The Maduro government has placed numerous limitations on a free and fair vote. It has disqualified candidates, arrested opposition activists and made it difficult for millions of Venezuelans living abroad to register to vote.
For many government critics, the ballot arrangement is yet another move by the authoritarian government to skew the vote in its favor, even as polls suggest overwhelming support for the opposition.
“As the election has become less and less competitive, the voting instruments have become more confusing,” said Eugenio Martinez, director of Votoscopio, an election monitoring organization.
Venezuela’s electoral authority did not respond to a request for comment.
It is not unusual in some countries for multiple parties to nominate the same candidate, several election experts said.
That’s what has been happening for a long time in Venezuela, and the fact that a candidate appears more than once on the ballot is not in itself a sign of a flawed election, said Carlos Medina, director of the Venezuelan Electoral Observatory, an independent group.
What is worrying, he added, is that many of the parties on the ballot have been co-opted by the Maduro government to either nominate Maduro or government-approved candidates.
“In the case of Venezuela, it is traditional for voting options to be seen in this way,” he said. “The problem lies in the origin of the political parties that are supporting 13 times, in this case Nicolás Maduro.”
About six years ago, the government began targeting some of the country’s oldest and most established political parties and replacing their leaders with government loyalists.
At the same time, he approved the creation of a series of new parties to preserve a façade of democracy by nominating candidates that political experts and many Venezuelan voters do not consider legitimate challengers.
Fourteen of the 38 parties on the ballot were created in the last six years.
Under Venezuelan law, the party with the most votes in the previous election is the first to choose its place on the ballot, and allied parties supporting the same candidate are placed together.
But the three parties supporting Gonzalez do not appear together because when the ballot configuration was determined, those parties did not support the same candidate. So their three images do not appear in a row.
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“They are trying to maintain the facade of an election, but gradually limiting people’s ability to vote for what they want,” said Tamara Taraciuk Broner, a Venezuela expert for the Inter-American Dialogue, a research organization in Washington. “And the ballot is a clear example of that.”
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