After midnight, with 80% of the votes counted, the Electoral Authority announced Nicolás Maduro as the winner of the presidential elections with 51.2% of the votes compared to 44.2% for the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, supported by the right-wing María Corina Machado. The National Electoral Council (CNE) announced a turnout of 59%, describing the result as “irreversible.” Hours earlier, the electoral command of Edmundo González and María Corina Machado had denounced irregularities in the transmission of the votes and the arbitrary expulsion of witnesses from the polling stations.
The CNE issued the first official statement six hours after the formal closing of the election and in a climate of tension, declaring the result irreversible with 80% of the votes counted, with a 7-point difference between Maduro and González and without percentages for the other 8 candidates, nor the national distribution of the votes.
The opposition rejected the result at a press conference. María Corina Machado announced that “Venezuela has a new president and it is Edmundo González Urrutia”, who according to their data and exit polls had received 70% of the votes.
For the moment, in the statements of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, they only called for a “civic vigil,” but the doubts about the CNE data open a political crisis whose development and outcome are uncertain. When asked by one of the journalists if they were going to call for people to take to the streets, Edmundo González declared that “nobody is calling for people to take to the streets.”
In the hours leading up to the vote, some presidents and officials from Latin American countries issued statements calling for respect for the results and transparent reporting of data, to which the Venezuelan government responded with a statement warning of an “intervention operation against the electoral process.”
After the results were announced, Chilean President Gabriel Boric questioned the results announced by the CNE and insisted once again on the transparency of the process.
The Maduro regime must understand that the results it publishes are difficult to believe. The international community and above all the Venezuelan people, including the millions of Venezuelans in exile, demand total transparency of the minutes and the process, and that observers…
— Gabriel Boric Font (@GabrielBoric) July 29, 2024
Boric’s message was joined by that of the Peruvian presidency and also that of the United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, demanding a “fair and transparent” recount of the votes.
A total of 21 million 620 thousand 705 Venezuelan voters in the country and 228 thousand voters residing abroad were eligible to vote in more than 15,000 centers distributed throughout the country.
News in development…
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
