Mr González was a stand-in for María Corina Machado, a wildly popular former congresswoman whom the regime had banned from running for election. She had called on her supporters to vote for the former ambassador—and they did, in overwhelming numbers. Ms Machado fully expected Mr Maduro’s creatures in the electoral council to lie about the result. So she organised the retrieval, on election day, of thousands of paper receipts from voting machines. These showed that more than 67% of votes had gone to the opposition.