SUCRE, Venezuela — She had heard the calls for a boycott of the election. She worried that the ruling party might toy with the results and undermine her candidate should he prevail. And the day promised to be a very long one: The government had relocated her voting site from the place she had cast ballots since 1972 to a distant, crime-ridden neighborhood.

But Roberta Elicelia Castillo Isturiz, 77, was not about to sit out regional elections on Sunday in Venezuela, the country’s first election in the months since President Nicolás Maduro forced through a major consolidation of power that most of the nation’s neighbors say amounts to a dictatorship.

“The worst thing is to stay at home,” Ms. Castillo said as she sat in her old voting site in this municipality in the state of Miranda, in northern Venezuela, waiting for a bus to take her to the new site. “Hope is the last thing to be lost.”

Amid an economic crisis that has caused crippling shortages of food and medicine and spurred a sharp increase in violence, Venezuelans went to the polls on Sunday to vote for governors in the country’s 23 states.