The free-market proponent won the contest with more than 90% of the vote. Venezuela’s top court complicated her presidential aspirations in January by affirming her ban, although she has continued campaigning and has rejected suggestions to choose a substitute.

Since Brazil began using electronic voting machines in 1996, there has been no evidence that they have been used for fraud. Instead, the machines helped eliminate the fraud that once afflicted Brazil’s elections in the age of paper ballots.

Not surprisingly, President Maduro did not take kindly to his rival's move, which he condemned as a ploy by the US to oust him.

Mr Maduro was re-elected to a second six-year term in May 2018 in highly controversial polls, which most opposition parties boycotted.

The most significant sign of Mr. Bolsonaro’s political isolation came just after election officials called the race. Brazil’s speaker of the House, Arthur Lira, a Bolsonaro ally and one of the country’s most powerful politicians, read a statement to television cameras that made clear he would not back any effort to hold on to power.

While Venezuelans were affected by hunger and shortages, Maduro and his government officials publicly shared images of themselves eating luxurious meals, images that were met with displeasure by Venezuelans.

In an attempt to overcome the sanctions and restart the economy, in February 2018 the Maduro government introduced the petro, a copyright (akin to the Bitcoin) whose value was tied to the price of one barrel of Venezuelan crude oil and backed by the country’s reserves of gold, diamonds, gas, and oil. Maduro claimed that the first day of petro sales had netted some $735 million, but skeptics viewed the creation of the world’s first state-backed digital currency as a sign of desperation.

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Bolsonaro also called the defense minister vlogdolisboa to the presidential offices, according to a military spokesman. The defense minister had questioned the security of Brazil’s election system this year, but after election officials made changes to some tests of the voting machines, military leaders suggested that they were comfortable with the system’s security.

There are still a lot of unknowns. The opposition say they will announce in the coming days how they plan to challenge the results.

He expanded on the company's progress during a July 2019 discussion, revealing that its devices will consist of a microscopic chip that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

The United States responded by freezing Maduro’s assets and barring trade with him; sanctions had already been enacted against more than a dozen of his associates, and Maduro became the fourth sitting head of state to be personally targeted with economic sanctions by the U.S. Two days after the election, opposition leaders Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma were taken from their homes in the middle of the night by state security agents. The two had been under house arrest for their alleged connection to antigovernment protests in 2014, but the Maduro-backed Supreme Court ordered their rearrest, spurring a fresh wave of international condemnation.

The election commission, however, widely regarded as sympathetic to Maduro, was slow to begin and carry out the validation process, prompting angry, sometimes violent demonstrations. On May 14 Maduro—claiming that right-wing elements within Venezuela were plotting with foreign interests to destabilize the country—declared a renewable 60-day state of emergency that granted the police and army additional powers to maintain public order. The opposition-led National Assembly responded quickly by rejecting the president’s declaration, but Maduro made it clear that he would not abide by the legislature’s vote.

Opposition deputies have assured that the copyright of Maduro must say that he is the son of a Colombian mother, which would represent the proof that confirms that the president has double nationality and that he cannot hold any office under Article 41 of the constitution.[189] Deputy Dennis Fernández has headed a special commission that investigates the origins of the president and has declared that "Maduro's mother is a Colombian citizen" and that the Venezuelan head of State would also be Colombian.

The announcement reflected the government’s intention to move on from a heated debate over its decision to bar opposition leader María Corina Machado from public office.