Those wanting to vote for the incumbent president will struggle to miss.
At today’s Venezuelan presidential election, voters are spoilt for choice with 13 different versions of the current president… among a few other options.
Nicolás Maduro is hoping to extend his term by another six years after initially coming to power after the death of his mentor Hugo Chávez in 2013.
And going by the ballot, it looks like it might be difficult not to vote for the autocratic leader.
He appears a grand total of 13 times, with the same picture of his mustachioed face filling the entire top row before popping up twice on the second row and once on the third for good measure.
In Venezuela, it’s not unusual for different political parties to nominate the same person for president.
Several of the other presidential candidates also appear more than once on the ballot – including Maduro’s top rival, Edmundo González, who features three times.
But they are all far less prominent in a layout that appears to have been designed to make it as easy as possible to vote for the status quo.
Between Chávez and Maduro, authoritarian socialists have been in charge of Venezuela for the past 25 years, with both retaining their grip on power through questionable elections.
González, a 74-year-old former diplomat, only emerged as the top candidate to face off against Maduro after the opposition’s first two picks were blocked by courts loyal to the president.
María Corina Machado, 56, won a primary to decide who would go on the ballot with 93% of the vote in October last year – despite being barred from running for public office.
After that ban was upheld, it was arranged that a woman named Corina Yoris would stand in her place, but she was not allowed to register.
So the job of leading the anti-Maduro coalition fell to González, who is now supported by an overwhelming majority of Venezuelans according to opinion polls.
However, it is unclear what will happen if the opposition candidate does come out victorious following the election today.
The PSUV party led by Maduro heads up a coalition that dominates the country’s National Assembly, which in turn picks the people who sit on Venezuela’s highest court and the council that organises its elections.
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