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Venezuela's state-run electoral commission announced that authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro won Sunday's presidential election, but the opposition has refused to accept the results and alleges serious irregularities in the vote count.
Pre-election polls and early results on the day of the election had predicted a landslide victory for the opposition, but Elvis Amoroso, president of the National Electoral Council, announced that with 80% of the votes counted, Maduro had won 51.2% of the vote, to 44.2% for the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González.
President Amoroso called the results “overwhelming and irrevocable” and was quick to congratulate Maduro on his victory, blaming a delay of several hours in the counting of the results on a “terrorist” act of sabotage of the voting system. The leaders of Cuba and Nicaragua sent their congratulations to the president as Maduro's supporters celebrated outside the presidential palace.
Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who was barred from running in the election and ran Gonzalez as her proxy candidate, said after the official results were released that Gonzalez was Venezuela's legitimate president. She said he received 70 percent of the votes verified by her office. “We not only defeated them politically, morally and spiritually, but today we defeated them with our votes across the whole of Venezuela,” she said at a news conference.
Delsa Solorzano, the main opposition leader on the National Electoral Council, said earlier that “witnesses have been excluded from a significant number of polling stations.” [and] Some countries are refusing to communicate the results.”
Venezuelan law says independent witnesses have the right to verify the vote count and remain at polling stations until they receive a printed copy of the results. The opposition claims it has only received results from 30% of polling stations.
Both sides were positioning the election as a turning point for the once-wealthy oil-exporting nation, whose economy has collapsed over the past decade due to government mismanagement and harsh U.S. sanctions, causing a quarter of the population to flee and sparking the largest migration crisis in the Americas.
Voters cast their ballots peacefully using electronic voting machines at more than 15,000 polling stations, some patiently waiting for hours in the heat, but problems arose after the polls closed when election officials remained silent for more than six hours before announcing the results.
“I am Nicolás Maduro Moros, the re-elected president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” the former bus driver and trade union activist said in a combative victory speech outside the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas.
Wearing a tracksuit jacket emblazoned with the Venezuelan flag, Maduro accused the United States of meddling in Venezuela's elections and said “this is not the first time the United States has tried to undermine peace in Venezuela.”
Maduro said the electoral commission had been targeted in a “devil” cyber attack and vowed to crush with an “iron fist” the “terrorists” plotting against his government. He mocked the opposition for warning of the dangers of election fraud before the vote.
Maduro's disputed victory amid allegations of fraud has left Washington in a dilemma: The Biden administration had been secretly negotiating with Maduro to secure guarantees of competitive elections in exchange for sanctions relief.
“We have serious concerns that the results announced do not reflect the will and vote of the Venezuelan people,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Tokyo.
Maduro has become increasingly combative as opinion polls in the weeks leading up to Sunday's vote have shown the opposition's lead growing, threatening “bloodshed” if the opposition wins, calling main opposition leader Machado a dangerous fascist and Gonzalez a “coward” and a “puppet of the far-right.”
Gonzalez, a 74-year-old former diplomat, was running as a replacement for Machado, who won an opposition primary in October but was barred from running by the government-controlled Supreme Court in January. The Maduro regime has taken a range of measures to thwart the opposition movement, including arresting dozens of activists and aides.
In Petare, a poor Caracas neighborhood once considered a stronghold of former President Hugo Chavez, 52-year-old Marvin Velasco waited four hours in the sun to vote on Sunday.
Velasco had previously supported Maduro's populist predecessor, Chavez, but on Sunday voted for the opposition.
“People cannot continue to live hungry and without water,” he said, standing opposite a mural depicting President Maduro, President Chavez and independence hero Simon Bolivar. “There has to be a change.”
Of about 30 people questioned by the Financial Times in Petare, not one said they would vote for Maduro.
Fearing that Maduro might manipulate the results or block access to polling stations, the opposition conducted a parallel vote count and registered tens of thousands of witnesses to monitor the election. International observers were largely absent, after the government rescinded an invitation for the European Union to monitor the election and refused to accept observers from the Organization of American States.
