An Associated Press analysis of vote tallies released Friday by Venezuela’s main opposition showed their candidates won far more votes in Sunday’s election than the government claimed, casting doubt on President Nicolas Maduro The official statement of victory casts serious doubts.
The AP processed nearly 24,000 tally images, representing results from 79% of voting machines. Each coded vote was counted as a QR code, which the AP programmatically decoded and analyzed to produce a final list of 10.26 million votes.
Opposition Edmundo González was calculated to have received 6.89 million votes, nearly 500,000 more than the government said Maduro had won. The tally also showed that Maduro received 3.13 million votes from the published vote count.
By comparison, the latest results released by the government’s National Electoral Commission on Friday showed Maduro with 6.4 million votes and González with 5.3 million, based on 96.87% of votes counted. Elvis Amoroso, president of the National Electoral Commission, attributed the delay in results updates to a “massive attack” on “technical infrastructure.”
The Associated Press was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the 24,532 statistical tables provided by the opposition. The AP successfully extracted data from 96% of the polls provided, with the remaining 4% having images of too poor quality to parse.
Gonzalez and opposition leader María Collina Machado said on Monday they had obtained vote tallies from national voting centers that showed Maduro lost his third six-year term in a landslide term of office.
The opposition first offered voters the chance to find scanned copies of vote tallies online. But the campaign released the results of the scan on Friday following criticism and threats from Maduro and his inner circle.
Statistical tables, called “actas” in Spanish, are lengthy printouts similar to shopping receipts. They have long been considered the final proof of Venezuela’s election results.
Violence escalated early on Friday when six masked assailants ransacked an opposition headquarters after some countries demanded proof of victory from Maduro.
The parties of Machado and Gonzalez said the attackers broke in and made off with valuable documents and equipment in the attack at around 3am. Several walls were covered in black spray paint.
The raid came after senior officials, including Maduro, threatened to arrest Machado, who has gone into hiding while still urging Venezuelans and the international community to challenge Sunday’s election results.
The Biden administration has firmly sided with the opposition, recognizing Gonzalez as the winner and questioning the official results from the National Election Commission. Gonzalez was named in April as a last-minute replacement for Machado, who was barred from running for political office.
The U.S. announcement late Thursday came after several governments, including Maduro’s close regional allies, called on Venezuelan electoral authorities to release precinct-level vote counts, as they have done in previous elections.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement: “Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the people of Venezuela that Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia’s death in Venezuela on July 28 Won the most votes in the presidential election.
Gonzalez, whose location is also unknown, posted a message on X thanking the United States for “recognizing the will of the Venezuelan people reflected in our electoral victory and supporting the process of restoring democratic norms in Venezuela.”
Maduro said at a news conference on Friday that the United States should stay away from Venezuelan politics.
Maduro also claimed that opposition members were “planning attacks in communities near Caracas,” where Machado called on supporters to gather with their families on Saturday. He played the audio and showed an image of an alleged WhatsApp chat that he said was evidence of a planned attack.
He said he had ordered armed forces to guard the community. The order may limit the ability of opposition supporters to gather but will not affect planned demonstrations by ruling party supporters elsewhere in the city.
Brazil, Colombia and Mexico launched a series of diplomatic efforts to persuade Maduro to allow an impartial audit of the vote. On Thursday, the three governments issued a joint statement calling on Venezuela’s electoral authorities to “expeditiously move forward and publicly release” detailed voting data.
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, said on Friday that Russian election monitors had witnessed Maduro’s legitimate victory and accused the United States of fanning tensions in the country.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves and was once known as Latin America’s most developed economy. However, after Maduro came to power in 2013, Venezuela’s economy plummeted, with hyperinflation reaching 130,000% and widespread shortages.
U.S. oil sanctions have only deepened the suffering, and the Biden administration — which has been easing those restrictions — may now tighten them again unless Maduro agrees to some form of transition.
“He’s counting on being able to wait it out until this is over and people will get tired of the demonstrations,” said Cynthia Arnson, a distinguished fellow at the Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington. “The problem is, the country is in a death spiral, and without the benefits of fair elections, Without legality, the economy cannot recover.”
Thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets on Monday after the National Electoral Commission declared Maduro the winner, and the government said it had arrested hundreds of protesters.
On Wednesday, Maduro asked Venezuela’s Supreme Court to conduct an audit of the election, but the request drew almost immediate criticism from foreign observers, who said the court, like most institutions, is government-controlled and lacks the independence to conduct a credible review. .
When the court convened the nine presidential candidates on Friday afternoon, González was conspicuously absent — an empty chair next to Maduro.
Supreme Court President Carisilia Rodríguez called on candidates and their parties to provide all required documents when the court seeks the results of the audit.
Maduro took the opportunity to call Gonzalez a “fascist candidate” and promised to hand over all vote counts.
Maduro and his campaign manager, National Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodriguez, later sought to discredit vote tallies posted online by the opposition, saying they lacked electoral commission representatives as well as poll workers and party representatives ‘s signature.
They do not acknowledge that soldiers, militiamen, police and loyalists of Venezuela’s ruling United Socialist Party on Sunday prevented some opposition representatives from entering polling stations, witnessing the vote, signing and obtaining copies of vote tallies.
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