Venezuela has a presidential election coming up at the end of July. As you may know, the country's socialist dictator, Nicolas Maduro, has already done everything he can to rig the election and ensure he remains in power for another six years.

Last year, opposition parties held a referendum to decide who would represent them in the election. The winner by a landslide was Maria Corina Machado, a candidate who supports free market reforms in her country. Maduro's government immediately announced that she would not be allowed to run for office. The country's Supreme Court, which is packed with Maduro's toadies, backstopped that decision.

With their chosen candidate ruled off limits, the opposition finally settled on a substitute, a 74-year-old former diplomat named Edmundo González Urrutia. He was literally no one's choice for president last year but not he is running with the support of Maria Machado and is now the favorite in the race.

"When I accepted the proposal they made to me to participate as a candidate, I told them that for this to have political force I had to have the unanimous endorsement of the parties that make up the Democratic Unitary Platform. And so it was. All the parties unanimously decided to support me to present my candidacy before the CNE as a presidential candidate,” he said.

According to the most recent polls, that support has worked among the country’s electorate: Polling firms such as Meganalisis and Datincorp give him broad support, ranging from 61.1% to 50%, respectively.

So there really does seem to be a chance that González could win, at least he could in a fair election. But no one really thinks this is going to be a fair election.

María Puerta-Riera, a professor of political science at Valencia College in Florida, has no doubt that the opposition can win elections, “because people are fed up and want to support any opposition option."...

“The important thing is to recognize that the government is going to use all its formal and informal power to prevent his victory," she said. "Not only are they going to send the police to persecute and monitor him, but they also have armed informal groups. I doubt that they will allow him to campaign freely."

Those armed informal groups are the colectivos, basically they are Marxist enforcers who ride around on motorcycles terrorizing the regimes opponents. They will be out in force and it would not surprise me if they opened fire on González or his supporters in the next two months.

This week there was another clear sign that the ruling socialists aren't going to leave the outcome to the vote of the people. Venezuela rescinded its offer to have EU elections observers witness the process.

The president of the council, Elvis Amoroso, said in a televised broadcast that he was rescinding the invitation until the E.U. lifted “the unilateral and genocidal coercive sanctions imposed on our people.”

“It would be immoral to allow their participation knowing their neocolonialist and interventionist practices against Venezuela,” he added...

A proposal in the legislature would also allow the government to suspend the opposition’s campaign at any moment. Many Venezuelans living abroad have been unable to register to vote because of expensive and cumbersome requirements.

There are so many ways for Maduro to cheat that this should be easy for him. He can threaten people not to vote for González, he can stuff ballot boxes or simply lie about the vote counts. Or he could simply disqualify his opponent at the last minute and leave the majority of the country with no one to vote for at all.

As I've said before, all of this could have a big impact on the US. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have already fled the country as Maduro's rule has led to runaway inflation and a lack of food and medicine. But polls suggest a significant number of Venezuelans are waiting to see what happens in the upcoming election to decide whether they will also flee their country.

A nationwide poll conducted last month by the Venezuela-based research firm Delphos showed that roughly a fourth of people are thinking about migrating, primarily for economic reasons. Of those thinking about leaving Venezuela, about 47% said an electoral win by the opposition would make them stay and roughly the same amount indicated that an improved economy would also keep them in their home country.

Migration decisions are dominating conversations at malls, high schools and political rallies. Some people are saving whatever money they can from various jobs and others are selling their belongings...

“I have lost my children because they dropped out of college and migrated. I want them to come back and have a family life and a better future,” said Montilla, who has a small convenience store in Sabana de Mendoza. His eyes swelled at the thought of a family reunion, but after a few hopeful seconds, he considered the other possibility after the election.

“I better encourage my other son to leave if Maduro wins again. He has to leave,” Montilla said. “I might leave, too.”

Bottom line, if Maduro cheats his way to victory this July, there will be millions more Venezuelans who decide there is no hope for a better future. Many of them will leave the country and while a majority may stay in neighboring countries in South and Central American, we can probably expect hundreds of thousands of them to head for America.

Long term, anti-Marxist Venezuelans are probably going to wind up being conservatives like the Cuban expats in Florida, but in the short run a big new wave of migrants is always a recipe for chaos and we've already had a lot of that in the past couple years.

This report was posted last week.