Venezuela’s opposition and the US media claim fraud in the July 28 election based on an exit poll from US government-linked firm Edison Research, which works with CIA-linked state propaganda outlets.
By Ben Norton
Jul 29, 2024
Venezuela’s opposition has claimed that it won the July 28 election, accusing President Nicolás Maduro of “fraud”.
The supposed evidence that Venezuelan opposition leaders and their allies have cited to justify this claim is an exit poll produced by a firm that is closely linked to the US government and does work for US state propaganda outlets that were founded by the CIA.
A New Jersey-based company called Edison Research published an exit poll on the day of the election projecting that right-wing candidate Edmundo González Urrutia would win with 65% of the vote, compared to just 31% for Maduro.
This poll was cited by Venezuela’s far-right, US-backed opposition leader Leopoldo López, as well as by billionaire oligarch Elon Musk and Western media outlets like the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.
Many polling firms inside Venezuela are run by opposition figures and are notorious for their political bias. The most respectable independent firm in the country is the pollster Hinterlaces, which estimated in its exit poll that Maduro got 54.6% of the vote, compared to 42.8% for González.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) ultimately reported that Maduro won the election with 51.2% of the vote, whereas González received 44.2%, and eight other opposition candidates got 4.6% combined. These results were close to what Hinterlaces projected, but very far off from what Edison Research claimed.
The US State Department, which has backed numerous coup attempts in Venezuela, refused to recognize Maduro’s victory. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the results into question.
On the other hand, independent electoral observers said the vote was free and fair. Monitors from the US National Lawyers Guild wrote that their delegation in Venezuela “observed a transparent, fair voting process with scrupulous attention to legitimacy, access to the polls, and pluralism”. They strongly condemned the opposition’s “attacks on the electoral system as well as the role of the US in undermining the democratic process”.
Although Edison Research’s exit poll has been widely cited by the US media to cast doubt upon Venezuela’s electoral results, it is by no means an impartial observer. In fact, Edison’s top clients include CIA-linked US government propaganda outlets Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, all of which are operated by the US Agency for Global Media, a Washington-based organ that is used to spread disinformation against US adversaries.
Edison Research has likewise worked with UK state media outlet the BBC.
In addition to Venezuela, Edison has previously conducted suspicious polling in Ukraine, Georgia, and Iraq – areas of the world that have been deemed highly strategic by the US State Department and targeted by Washington’s relentless meddling.
Edison’s international research is managed by the company’s Executive Vice President Rob Farbman. He was also cited in the press release on the Venezuela exit poll, and was listed as the contact for the study.
The US firm’s website notes that “Farbman manages Edison’s international research with a specialization in the Middle East and Africa for clients including BBC, the Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty”.
These US state media outlets are a key part of what the New York Times described in 1977 as a “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.”
The Times identified Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (as well as Radio Free Asia and Free Cuba Radio) as “C.I.A. broadcasting ventures”.
In fact, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) states on its own website: “Initially, RFE and RL were funded principally by the U.S. Congress through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)”.
When it started, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was called “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism”, before changing its name to Radio Liberation in 1956 and Radio Liberty in 1963.
This US state propaganda outlet was a key tool of information warfare during the first cold war against the Soviet Union and its allies. Today, it has continued disseminating disinformation about countries like Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran.
On his LinkedIn profile, Edison Research’s executive vice president, Rob Farbman, wrote that he has overseen “election polling for international clients, most recently in Venezuela, Iraq, Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia”.
Farbman added that he “manages Edison’s work with international broadcasting organizations such as the BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Voice of America”.
On LinkedIn, Farbman also states that “Edison works with a broad array of commercial clients, governments, and NGOs”, although he did not disclose what those governments are.
Edison’s corporate clients include Big Tech monopolies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Oracle, which have billions of dollars of contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, and other US government agencies.
Washington’s state propaganda outlets are overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). USAGM’s parent is the United States Information Agency (USIA).
USAGM is funded through Congress. For fiscal year 2025, President Joe Biden’s budget requested $950 million for the US propaganda agency.
USAGM boasted in its Congressional Budget Justification that its audience has more than doubled in the past decade. According to the US propaganda agency, Washington’s disinformation operations are “reaching 420 million people weekly in 63 languages and over 100 countries”.
On its website, USAGM emphasizes that it serves the “long-range interests of the United States”.
In 1994, Congress passed the International Broadcasting Act, which maintained US government funding for these propaganda organs following the end of the first cold war.
This legislation, the text of which USAGM has on its website, states that the work of these US propaganda outlets must “be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States”, and that they are “advancing the goals of United States foreign policy”.
Venezuelan opposition and Elon Musk misrepresent TeleSUR charts to claim “fraud”
To claim there was supposed electoral fraud in the July 28 election, Venezuela’s US-backed opposition used another deceptive tactic, distorting charts that were published by the Latin American media outlet TeleSUR.
In their disinformation campaign, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition got a big helping hand from Elon Musk, the billionaire oligarch and owner of Twitter (now known as X.com).
Musk has received billions of dollars of subsidies from the US government, while providing assistance to Ukraine’s military and aiding US destabilization operations in Iran. He also is actively supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
The billionaire Tesla CEO backed a far-right coup in 2019 against Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist President Evo Morales. Following the putsch, a critic on Twitter accused “the U.S. government [of] organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so [Musk] could obtain the lithium there”. The oligarch responded writing, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it”.
The day before the 2024 election in Venezuela, Elon Musk tweeted an enthusiastic endorsement for the South American nation’s far-right opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has repeatedly called for a US military intervention to overthrow Venezuela’s government.
After the vote, Musk echoed the unsubstantiated claims of the opposition, claiming there was “major election fraud by Maduro”. As purported proof, Musk shared the suspicious exit poll from the US government-linked Edison Research.
In another deception, Musk and Venezuelan opposition figures pointed to a chart from TeleSUR, a left-wing broadcaster that has been funded by numerous governments in Latin America and is headquartered in Caracas.
A graphic designer at TeleSUR made a mistake and created a misleading graph that showed the other opposition candidates with 4.6% of the vote each. In reality, there were 10 candidates in Venezuela’s presidential election, and the other eight minor opposition figures only received 4.6% combined.
Part of this confusion was due to the language used in the announcement by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE). In a press conference late on the night of the election, CNE President Elvis Amoroso reported that Maduro won 51.2% of the vote, with Edmundo González at 44.2%, and he added that “other candidates obtained 462,704 [votes], 4.6%”. (In Spanish, his exact words were: “otros candidatos obtuvieron 462.704 [votos], un 4,6%“.)
In this press conference and in its written statement, the CNE lumped the eight other candidates together. TeleSUR’s graphic designer failed to communicate that this 4.6% was shared among the eight candidates.
While this error was clearly a serious problem in TeleSUR’s broadcast, it was not proof of supposed electoral fraud.
On the contrary, international observers, such as those from the US National Lawyers Guild, said they monitored an electoral process in Venezuela that was free and fair.
US government support for Venezuela’s opposition and coup attempts
This is by no means the first time Venezuela’s opposition has cried fraud, without any concrete evidence. In response to every recent presidential election, they have made similar claims, going back to Maduro’s first successful presidential race in 2013.
Like Edison Research, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition is closely linked to the US government.
US soft-power organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency for International Development (USAID) have spent many millions of dollars funding and training opposition groups in Venezuela, including political parties, media outlets, and so-called NGOs.
Washington has sponsored numerous coup attempts in Venezuela, including one in 2002 in which US-backed Venezuelan military officers briefly overthrew democratically elected President Hugo Chávez, before the people rose up, filled the streets, and restored Chávez to power.
In another coup attempt in 2019, the Donald Trump administration recognized little-known right-wing opposition politician Juan Guaidó as supposed “interim president” of Venezuela, despite the fact that he had never participated in a presidential election.
Washington proceeded to seize billions of dollars worth of Venezuelan foreign assets, in violation of international law, while imposing illegal unilateral sanctions and an embargo that sought to crush the country’s economy.
A Trump administration official bragged that the sanctions were like Darth Vader’s death grip on the throat of the Venezuelan economy.
The US Energy Information Administration gloated in 2019 that, due to the devastating US economic war, Venezuela’s oil production crashed to the lowest level in decades, starving the state of revenue it needed to fund social programs.
According to the top UN expert on sanctions, Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan, “unilateral sanctions increasingly imposed by the United States, the European Union and other countries have exacerbated the” economic crisis in Venezuela, and the “government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99% with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income”.
In a research paper published by the US think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research, economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs estimated that US sanctions caused 40,000 deaths in Venezuela from 2017 to 2018.
Trump’s neoconservative National Security Advisor John Bolton admitted in a CNN interview that the operation he oversaw in Venezuela was a coup attempt.
During the coup, one of Guaidó’s allies was the far-right Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado. But when Guaidó failed to even come close to power in Caracas, despite Washington’s staunch support, the extremist Machado rose to become the de facto leader of Venezuela’s opposition.
Machado was prohibited from running in the 2024 election due to the many crimes she has committed, including participating in numerous violent coup attempts; calling for the US military to invade Venezuela; and lobbying Washington for, in her words, “more sanctions”, to bring about the “total financial asphyxiation” of her country.
For years, Machado has run opposition organizations funded by the US government. She is so close to Washington that she was personally invited to the White House for a one-on-one meeting with President George W. Bush in 2005. (The Bush administration had supported the briefly successful military coup against Chávez in 2002, which Machado also backed.)
Machado was largely the power behind the main opposition candidate who ran against Maduro in the 2024 race, Edmundo González Urrutia. Machado campaigned for him, and on the night of July 28, she held a press conference in which she claimed, without any evidence, that they had won the election, declaring, “Venezuela has a new president-elect, and he is Edmundo González”.
Edison Research’s meddling in Georgia
Edison Research’s Executive Vice President Rob Farbman is not the only employee at the firm who has worked extensively with US government propaganda outlets.
Edison Senior Advisor Nino Japaridze likewise did work for the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, RFE/RL, and Voice of America, as well as London’s BBC.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors is the US government propaganda organ that was renamed the US Agency for Global Media in 2018.
In 2019, Japaridze sat down for a friendly interview with US propaganda outlet Voice of America, to discuss “the importance of media independence for Georgia’s democracy”.
Washington has targeted Georgia in recent years, seeking to bring the former Soviet country into the US imperial sphere of influence. Since 2008, the US government has insisted that Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO, despite opposition not only by Russia but also by Germany and France.
Washington’s pressure on Georgia greatly accelerated in 2024, when the country’s democratically elected parliament voted for a bill that required organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from outside the country to register as foreign agents.
US soft-power organizations like the NED, along with other Western governments, bankroll many pro-EU “civil society” groups and pro-NATO media outlets in Georgia, which would be forced to register as foreign agents under this law.
The US State Department lobbied heavily against the bill, and even imposed sanctions on Georgian officials who supported it.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its US government ties, Edison Research published a poll in December 2023 that claimed that a staggering 90% of people in Georgia want close ties with the European Union, 80% want close ties with the USA, and just 43% want close ties with Russia. This confirmed Washington’s narrative right at the moment when it was escalating its interventionist pressure campaign against the country.
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