President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro celebrates his reelection. Photo / Getty Images
The United States and several Latin American countries cast doubt on Monday (today NZ time) on President Nicolás Maduro’s reelection on Sunday as opposition leaders collected what some said was evidence of brazen electoral fraud.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, which Maduro controls, claimed early on Monday that he earned 51% of the vote to Edmundo Gonzalez’s 44%. Independent exit polling and partial results suggested Gonzalez in fact won twice as many votes as Maduro.
On Monday afternoon, council President Elvis Amoroso declared Maduro president for another six-year term - suggesting that a recount would not change the outcome announced earlier in the day.
The Venezuelan opposition, which had seen the election as its best chance in years of defeating the authoritarian socialist, rejected those results. Opposition leaders demanded that Maduro hand over scanned printouts of all voting records - more than 30,000 documents - signed and dated by poll workers and opposition observers, and not just the numbers shown on the government webpage, to prove their claims.
“The results are undeniable,” Gonzalez said late Sunday. “The country elected a peaceful change.”
Biden administration officials and the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which sent a technical observation team to monitor Sunday’s vote, made similar calls.
Opposition leaders, who organised, trained and sent thousands of ordinary citizens to polling places Sunday in anticipation of potential fraud, said records they had compiled from nearly 40% of the nation’s voting centres proved their victory.
According to their information, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said, Maduro’s win was “impossible.”
“We won, and the whole world knows it,” she told reporters early on Monday.
If true, Maduro’s claims would mark uncharted territory even for a strongman who has been accused of manipulating or tampering with elections on the margins several times over the past decade. In previous elections, he’s been accused of coercion, manipulation and other tricks to tip the vote a few percentage points in his favour.
Never before has he been accused of reversing a gap as large as the opposition is suggesting, according to electronic engineer Mario Torre, who’s auditing the electoral system for the opposition.
“For the first time they dare to give a result that is not the one that the system reflects,” Torre said. “We’re talking about a massive fraud.”
On Monday afternoon, voters across Venezuela poured into the streets, apparently of their own accord, and notably in working-class neighbourhoods that have long been strongholds of support for Maduro and his late mentor, Hugo Chavez, to bang pots and pans and demand he step down.
“We don’t agree with the fraud President Maduro committed,” said Marjory Rojas, a 40-year-old housekeeper from a working-class neighbourhood in Baruta, who was protesting along a highway in Caracas. “I have three children living outside of the country, and he’s saying he won? We want him to leave. It’s not fair what they’re doing to the country.”
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday called on Maduro to publish “the full, detailed tabulation of votes.”
“We’re going to withhold judgment until that time … and [then] we will respond accordingly,” he said.
Two senior Biden administration officials said Maduro’s government has all the voting data now and could release it immediately. That data, one said, is “required under Venezuelan law and should be immediately providable.”
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under terms set by the administration, said they had received ample information from multiple sources indicating that the results announced by the electoral council were “at odds with how people actually voted … potentially substantially at odds.”
The officials declined to detail possible next steps. One said the administration would “continue to assess our sanctions policy” in light of “the action or non-action” taken by the Maduro government and US interests.
But it was unlikely, one said, that the administration would cancel the licenses provided to Chevron and other oil companies allowing them to do business in Venezuela.
Maduro has ruled Venezuela since the death of Chavez, founder of the socialist state, in 2013. Many here blame him for the oil-rich country’s economic collapse and the exodus of millions of citizens, including hundreds of thousands who have fled to the United States.
Some Latin American countries, including Colombia and Brazil, which have friendly ties to Maduro, joined in the scepticism about the announced results, as did Spain, Italy and other European nations.
Celso Amorim, a top foreign policy adviser to Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, one of Maduro’s most important leftist allies, was reserving judgment.
Amorim was visiting the Miraflores presidential palace on Monday afternoon to meet with Maduro. He was also hoping to meet with González before reaching an assessment, according to a diplomatic official who was in Caracas with him.
Russia, China, Iran and Cuba congratulated Maduro.
In a memo, the opposition campaign declared the vote a “FRAUD” and said the “burden of proof” was on the government.
“Months will go by and they will not be able to deliver it to us. That is what we have to achieve, demanded by us and by the international community,” the memo’s authors wrote.
On Monday, Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab said the electoral data transmission system suffered an attempted “attack,” and he accused opposition leaders Lester Toledo and Leopoldo Lopez of carrying it out to “manipulate the data.” He also accused Machado of being involved, providing no evidence.
“What has happened in our country is a huge social movement that they will not stop,” said Machado, Venezuela’s most popular politician. “We are a civic peaceful movement, and that’s how we will keep working until we make the truth prevail - and it will prevail.”
In the run-up to the election, Maduro’s government barred Machado from running, arrested campaign workers and denied the opposition access to state media. During voting on Sunday, there were reports of blocked entry, delays and violence at some voting centres.
Maduro’s claims threatened to increase his and Venezuela’s isolation on the world stage. His Foreign Ministry said Monday it was withdrawing all of Venezuela’s diplomats from seven Latin American countries, including Argentina, Chile and Peru, and demanding those country’s governments do the same. (Maduro severed diplomatic relations with the United States in 2019.)
He’s been down this road before. In 2018, he claimed reelection in a vote marred by charges of irregularities, prompting mass protests at home and condemnation abroad.
The United States and other countries ultimately declared Maduro illegitimate and recognized then-National Assembly President Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s rightful leader.
In a statement early Monday, Maduro claimed without evidence that the electoral council had been hacked from an unnamed country, causing a delay in the publication of the full election results. “The demons and the devils did not want the total to be counted,” Maduro said.
Latin American leaders across the political spectrum cast doubt on the results.
Colombia’s foreign minister, Luis Gilberto Murillo, called for an independent verification and audit of the vote count “as soon as possible.”
Left-of-centre Chilean President Gabriel Boric described the official results as “difficult to believe” and demanded that independent international observers be given access to the full results. “From Chile, we will not recognise any result that is not verifiable,” he wrote on X early Monday.
On the other end of the political spectrum, Argentine President Javier Milei, too, said he would not recognise a “fraud.” “Venezuelans chose to end the communist dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro,” he posted on X, and he called on Venezuela’s armed forces to “defend democracy and the popular will.”
Peruvian Foreign Minister Javier Gonzalez-Olaechea accused Maduro’s regime of having the “intention of fraud” and recalled Peru’s ambassador to Venezuela for consultations. “Peru will not accept the violation of the popular will of the Venezuelan people,” he said on X.
Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay also issued calls for a transparent count of the votes by independent observers.
Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Bolivia and Honduras - all allies of Maduro - congratulated him.
The Russian ambassador to Caracas described the victory as “credible,” and President Vladimir Putin sent his best wishes. “Remember that you are always a welcome guest on Russian soil,” he told Maduro.
China’s Foreign Ministry congratulated Maduro and Venezuela on their “successful” election. “China and Venezuela are good friends and partners who support each other,” Chinese state media quoted ministry spokesman Lin Jian saying at a news conference.
Cuba’s Raul Castro, the younger brother of the late Fidel Castro and a former premier of the communist island nation himself, called Maduro to congratulate him, Cuba’s Foreign Ministry said.
Despite nightly missile barrages, Israel’s casualty toll has remained relatively low.