Prior to the July 28 elections in Venezuela, most pollsters anticipated that Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro would be defeated by Edmundo González in a landslide. Yet, there were doubts about Maduro’s willingness to concede defeat.

On the day of the elections, the National Electoral Council – completely controlled by Maduro –declared Maduro a winner. González is now contesting those results; people have gone out in protests, and a brutal wave of repression has now ensued.

This is not the first time that members of Venezuela’s opposition have raised allegations of election fraud. In the past, many silly claims were made. One central claim was that the voting machines were defective. Those allegations were never sustained with evidence, and ultimately, harmed the opposition’s credibility for many years.

But this time it is different. The current allegation is not that the machines do not work, but rather, that once the results from all electoral booths are sent to Caracas via the machines, the National Electoral Council modifies the results. And as opposed to allegations in the past, this time the fraud can be proven. Each machine has a QR code, and once scanned, it emits tally sheets and shows the results of each voting booth. Maria Corina Machado — Gonzalez’s political partner— has now published 80 percent of the tallies, and these numbers clearly show González as the winner by a wide margin.

Maduro contests the validity of those election tallies and has pledged to publish the supposedly real tallies. But day by day, Maduro falls short on his promise. In fact, it is likely that Maduro will never deliver, because the election tallies clearly show his defeat. He may produce false tallies, but this trick will hardly work, because false tallies can always be contrasted with the real tallies produced by the QR codes.

Will Maduro therefore be removed from power?

Unfortunately, no. Soon after the end of the Cold War, there were expectations that the whole of Latin America would embrace democracy. This did not come to pass. While we are no longer living in the times of military caudillos à la Woody Allen’s Bananas, it has become painfully evident that in the region, strongmen can still rule without the people’s consent. Cuba’s Díaz-Canel and Nicaragua’s Ortega are cases in point.

Dictators may no longer wear military fatigues, but ultimately, armies do have the power to sustain them.

Sadly, in Venezuela votes alone will not determine who stays in power. Generals have the last word. And it does seem that the Armed Forces are firmly in support of Maduro. However, considering Venezuela's 20th century history, there might still be room for optimism.

The last Venezuelan dictator before Maduro was General Marcos Pérez Jiménez. On December 15, 1957, Pérez Jiménez organized a plebiscite that would grant him five more years in power. Pérez Jiménez won electoral approval with 86 percent of the votes, but fraud allegations were rampant. In the days after the plebiscite, protests erupted but were swiftly suppressed, leading to their eventual decline. Then, a little over one month later, on January 23, 1958, themilitary staged a coup, removed Pérez Jiménez from power, and established a working democracy that lasted for at least 40 years.

Top-ranked generals are unlikely to remove Maduro from power; they have been handsomely rewarded by Maduro, and some of them have been the target of US sanctions.

But there is much greater uncertainty with mid-level officers. On the one hand, for years they have been heavily indoctrinated into accepting the regime’s narrative; on the other hand, they face the same daily struggles as the civilian population. If the military does take steps to remove Maduro from power, it will likely come from the ranks of mid-level officers.