So Chavez packed the court, huh? FDR would've been impressed.
Chávez’s electoral strategists have also figured out how to game the country’s bifurcated electoral system, in which 60 percent of officeholders are elected as individuals and the rest of the seats go to lists of candidates compiled by parties. The system is designed to favor the second-largest party. The party that wins the uninominal election loses some seats in the proportional representation system, which then get assigned to the second- largest party.
To massage this system, the government has adopted the system of morochas, local slang for twins. The government’s operatives create a new party to run separately in the uninominal elections. And so Chávez’s party avoids the penalty that would normally hit the party that wins in both systems. The benefit that would otherwise go to an opposition party gets captured instead by the same people that win the individual seats—the precise outcome the system was designed to avoid. In the August 2005 elections for local office, for instance, Chávez’s party secured 77 percent of the seats with only 37 percent of the votes in the city of Valencia. Without morochas, the government’s share of seats would have been 46 percent. The legality of many of the government’s strategies is questionable. And that is where controlling the National Electoral Council and the Supreme Court proves useful. To this day, neither body has found fault with any of the government’s electoral strategies.
I can't imagine being a citizen of Valencia and having to accept such a thing.