Thousands of people gathered in the streets of Venezuela’s capital on Saturday, waving the country’s flag and singing the national anthem to support an opposition candidate they say won the presidential election by a landslide.
Electoral authorities declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner of last Sunday’s election, but have yet to produce the vote tally proving his victory. Instead, the government has arrested hundreds of opposition supporters who took to the streets in the days following the disputed vote, and the president and his officials have also threatened to jail opposition leader María Corina Machado and his presidential candidate, Edmundo González.
On Saturday, supporters chanted and sang as Mme Machado arrived at the rally in Caracas. María Corina Machado, who was banned from running for office by Mr. Maduro’s government for 15 years, had been in hiding since Tuesday, saying her life and freedom were in danger. Masked assailants ransacked the opposition headquarters on Friday, taking documents and vandalizing the premises.
Mme Machado waved a Venezuelan flag and promised that the regime that forced millions of Venezuelans to leave their country would finally end.
“We have overcome all barriers! We have knocked them all down,” thundered M.me Machado: The regime has never been so weak.
President Maduro said at a news conference on Friday that opposition members were planning an attack in a Caracas neighborhood near where Machado’s rally was taking place on Saturday. He said he had ordered the armed forces to guard the neighborhood and also urged his supporters to attend “the mother of all marches” elsewhere in Caracas on Saturday.
The Organization of American States (OAS) called on Saturday for “reconciliation and justice” in Venezuela.
“May all Venezuelans who express themselves in the streets find only an echo of peace, a peace that reflects the spirit of democracy,” the OAS said in a statement.
One election, several counts
Mme Machado and Mr. González, a 74-year-old former diplomat, said that ballot records they obtained from polling stations across the country show that Mr. Maduro was defeated by a landslide for a third six-year term.
An Associated Press (AP) analysis of vote tallies released Friday by Venezuela’s main opposition indicates that its candidate won far more votes in Sunday’s election than the government claimed, casting serious doubt on the official claim that Mr. Maduro won.
On Friday night, the country’s highest court, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, ordered the National Electoral Council controlled by Nicolás Maduro to turn over vote tallies in three days. Several governments, including Maduro’s close regional allies, have called on Venezuela’s electoral authorities to release tallies at the constituency level, as they have done after previous elections.
The AP processed nearly 24,000 tally sheet images, representing results from 79% of voting machines, resulting in totals of 10.26 million votes.
According to the calculations, Mr. González received 6.89 million votes, nearly half a million more than those attributed to Mr. Maduro by the electoral authorities. The tables also show that Mr. Maduro received 3.13 million votes on the published tally sheets.
For comparison, the National Electoral Council said Friday that, based on 96.87% of the ballots, Nicolás Maduro won 6.4 million votes and Gonzalez 5.3 million. National Electoral Council President Elvis Amoroso blamed the delay in updating the results on “massive attacks” on “technological infrastructure.”
The AP was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the 24,532 tally sheets provided by the opposition. The AP was able to extract data from 96% of the provided vote tallies, with the remaining 4% of images too poor to analyze.
US Challenge
The Biden administration has strongly supported the opposition, recognizing Edmundo González as the winner and discrediting the official results of the National Electoral Council.
“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, more importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote in a statement.
Mr. González posted a message on X thanking the United States, while Mr. Maduro said Friday that the United States should stay out of Venezuelan politics.
There have been extensive diplomatic efforts by Brazil, Colombia and Mexico to convince Maduro to allow an impartial audit of the vote. On Thursday, the governments of the three countries issued a joint statement calling on Venezuela’s electoral authorities “to move forward expeditiously and make public” detailed voting data.
On Friday, Maduro and his campaign manager, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez, tried to discredit the tally sheets published online by the opposition, arguing that they were missing the signatures of the electoral council representative as well as election officials and party representatives.
They failed to acknowledge that soldiers, civilian militias, police and loyalists of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela on Sunday prevented some opposition representatives from entering polling stations, watching the vote, signing and obtaining copies of the tally sheets.