Vente Venezuela, the center-right political party of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, announced a plan recently to help identify major Venezuelan population centers around the world with the intent
of organizing for a presidential election in the near future.
The party announced the launch of a new website, called Constructores (Builders), asking Venezuelan citizens around the world to register and identify themselves with the party. Joining the Constructores project does not register the citizens with Vente Venezuela or any political party, but rather serves as a census of Venezuelans around the world.
As a result of over two and a half decades of socialism, a substantial percentage of the population of Venezuela has fled the country, seeking to escape abject poverty and severe, violent political repression. According to the United Nations, about 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past decade, spread throughout the world with major diaspora communities in Colombia, the United States, and Spain, among other nations. Anti-socialist leaders in the country argue that a presidential election that does not give the vote to these individuals – in addition to taking place before the release of all political prisoners and the reconstruction of key government institutions corrupted by the ruling socialists – cannot be considered free or fair.
Machado, who returned to Venezuela last week after about a year of forced exile following her Nobel Peace Prize recognition in 2025, has a history of high capacity for mass organization such as what would be necessary for organizing such an election abroad. In 2024, when she was banned from running for president against then-dictator Nicolás Maduro, Vente Venezuela organized a sprawling national ground game in which they collected the vote tallies at local voting stations in the country, proving that Maduro had lost decisively to Machado’s replacement candidate, elderly diplomat Edmundo González. González himself was also forced into exile in Spain by socialist regime threats.
According to the Argentine news network Infobae, Constructores works by asking individual Venezuelans to register, identify their location, and prove their identity. The website will build a database of citizens around the world, to be used to ensure enfranchisement when Venezuela ultimately holds a presidential election.
Atención, venezolanos en todos los rincones del mundo. 🇻🇪🌎
— Vente Venezuela (@VenteVenezuela) October 24, 2026
De Maturín a Buenos Aires, de Mérida a Madrid: somos millones, y el país necesita saber dónde estamos. Esta vez no solo vamos a votar. Vamos a construir Venezuela Tierra de Gracia, juntos.
Todos somos #Constructores:… pic.twitter.com/Bp8BODU17m
The process will include multiple phases, beginning with a study to identify locations that would require absentee voting stations to reach Venezuelans abroad, then a second phase to analyze existing voter rolls and remove any deceased individuals or those otherwise ineligible to vote. While the emphasis of the program appears to be in finding Venezuelans abroad, the registration process also includes those in the country, ensuring that all citizens are accounted for.
“Knowing where Venezuelans are, both inside and outside the country, is fundamental for advancing the updating of data and facilitating the eventual registration in the national registry of citizens under the new National Electoral Council (CNE),” Vente Venezuela announced in a statement.
The website for registrations emphasizes that the effort is being organized through Vente Venezuela’s established organization in Spain, which would likely facilitate the protection of personal information from being stolen by the socialist regime and used to imprison or arrest people.
Following the arrest of dictator Nicolás Maduro in January, Venezuela has been governed by an “interim” administration led by one of Maduro’s top henchwomen, Delcy Rodríguez, under the watchful eye of the U.S. State Department. Rodríguez has promised to hold free and fair elections. The State Department has since announced a multi-step plan to reconstruct Venezuela’s institutions and hold such an election, but has emphasized repeatedly that elections are impossible without the total dismantling and reconstruction of the CNE, which oversees elections and enforces rules, and the supreme court, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ). Both institutions were regularly used to undermine election results and reinforce socialist rule during the Maduro era.
"If you don't have a new TSJ and we don't have a new CNE, we cannot have a credible election because the loser of that election is going to claim that the other side cheated," a senior State Department official told reporters during a briefing last week, "or we can't have a credible election because the existing infrastructure that controls those two things will prevent a credible election from happening, so you have to create the architecture for a credible election before you have one."
Machado, who maintains friendly relations with President Donald Trump, appeared to endorse the State Department plan during remarks last week following her return to the country.
"Secretary of State Marco Rubio has outlined a sequence of steps aimed at advancing toward a democratic transition, which makes it clear that presidential elections will be held in 2027," she said.
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