Maduro asks Supreme Court to audit Venezuela’s election

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said he has asked the country’s Supreme Court to conduct an audit of the presidential election, after the opposition challenged his claim of victory and amid international calls to release detailed vote counts.

Maduro told reporters on Wednesday that the ruling party was also ready to release the full electoral results.

Maduro insists he won the election, even though his main challenger, Edmundo Gonzalez, and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado say they secured more than two-thirds of the tally sheets that each electronic voting machine printed after polls closed on Sunday. Opposition figures have said that releasing the data from those tallies would prove that Maduro lost the election.

Pressure has been mounting against Maduro. The National Electoral Council, which is loyal to the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has yet to release any printed results from polling stations, as it has done in past elections.

His close ally, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, joined other foreign leaders on Wednesday in urging him to release detailed vote counts. A day earlier, another Maduro ally, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, along with U.S. President Joe Biden, called for the “immediate release of complete, transparent and detailed voting data at the polling station level.”

Machado said vote counts obtained by the opposition show that Gonzalez received approximately 6.2 million votes, compared with 2.7 million for Maduro. That is very different from the electoral board’s report that Maduro received 5.1 million votes, compared with more than 4.4 million for Gonzalez.

“The serious doubts that have arisen around the Venezuelan electoral process could lead its people to a deep violent polarization, with serious consequences of permanent division,” Petro said Wednesday in a post on the social media site X.

“I call on the Venezuelan government to allow the elections to end peacefully, allowing for a transparent vote count, with the counting of votes, and with the supervision of all political forces in their country and professional international supervision,” he added.

Petro proposed that Maduro’s government and the opposition reach an agreement “that allows maximum respect for the (political) force that lost the elections.” The agreement, he said, could be submitted to the United Nations Security Council.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves and was once Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it went into freefall after Maduro took over in 2013. Plunging oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that topped 130,000 percent have led to social unrest and mass emigration.

More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014, the largest exodus in recent Latin American history. Many have settled in Colombia.

Speaking to reporters in Vietnam on Wednesday, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief said the bloc will not recognize Maduro’s claim of election victory without independent verification of voting records.

“They should have been provided immediately, as in any democratic electoral process,” said Josep Borrell.

The Carter Center, an independent U.S.-based election think tank, said Tuesday night it had failed to verify the results of Venezuela’s presidential election, blaming authorities for a “complete lack of transparency” in declaring Maduro the winner without providing any individual poll counts.

The group was authorized earlier this year by Venezuelan electoral authorities to send experts to observe the election. It had 17 experts spread across four cities on Sunday.

“The failure of the electoral authority to announce results disaggregated by polling station constitutes a serious violation of electoral principles,” the Carter Center said, adding that the election did not meet international standards and “cannot be considered democratic.”

Within hours of the electoral council announcing on Monday that Maduro had won, thousands of protesters took to the streets of the capital, Caracas, and other cities. The protests, which continued on Tuesday, turned violent at times, and police responded with tear gas and cannonballs.

Attorney General Tarek William Saab told reporters Tuesday that more than 700 protesters were arrested in nationwide demonstrations on Monday and that one police officer was killed.

Venezuela-based human rights organization Foro Penal also reported Tuesday that 11 people, including two minors, were killed in election-related unrest.

The Organization of American States is scheduled to meet on Wednesday to discuss the election in Venezuela.

Maduro’s closest allies in his ruling party quickly came to his defense. National Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodriguez — his chief negotiator in talks with the U.S. and the opposition — insisted that Maduro was the clear winner and called his opponents violent fascists.

Praising the arrests of the protesters, he said Machado should be arrested and González too, “because he is the leader of the fascist conspiracy that is trying to impose itself in Venezuela.”

In a Spanish-language post on X, the EU’s Borrell called on Venezuelan authorities to “end the arrests, repression and violent rhetoric against members of the opposition,” calling the threats against González and Machado “unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, Machado and González urged their supporters to remain calm and avoid violence.

“I ask Venezuelans to remain peaceful, demanding that the result be respected and the ballots be published,” González said at X. “This victory, which belongs to all of us, will unite us and reconcile us as a nation.”

Via News Agencies