Venezuelan President Maduro Asks Supreme Court to Conduct Audit of Contested Presidential Election

It is Maduro’s first concession to demands for greater transparency in elections. But the Supreme Court is closely linked to his government; the court’s judges are proposed by federal officials and ratified by the National Assembly, which is dominated by Maduro sympathizers.

The Carter Center has criticized Maduro’s request for an audit, saying the court will not conduct an independent review.

“You have another government institution that is appointed by the government to verify the government’s numbers on election results that are disputed,” said Jennie K. Lincoln, who led the Carter Center’s election monitoring delegation in Venezuela. “That is not an independent assessment.”

The Atlanta-based group said Tuesday evening that it had not been able to verify the election results and blamed authorities for a “complete lack of transparency” in declaring Maduro the winner. Venezuelan election authorities allowed the Carter Center to send 17 observers.

Maduro’s main rival, Edmundo Gonzalez, and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado say they have obtained more than two-thirds of the results sheets that each electronic voting machine printed after the polls closed. They said releasing those results would prove Maduro lost the election.

Maduro has insisted to reporters that there was a conspiracy against his government and that the electoral system had been hacked, a notion he reiterated during a news conference on Wednesday.

Asked why electoral authorities had not released detailed voting results, Maduro said the council had been attacked, including by cyberattacks.

“Engineers are currently working” to resolve the attacks, he said, without elaborating.

The government produced several videos that the president said showed people attacking and setting fire to some election offices. The Associated Press could not immediately verify the footage.

Venezuela’s prosecutor said Wednesday that more than 1,000 people had been arrested in connection with some of the attacks.

Pressure on the president has been mounting since the election. The National Electoral Council, which is loyal to the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has not yet released any printed results from polling centers, as it did in previous elections.

Maduro’s close ally, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, joined other foreign leaders on Wednesday in calling on him to release detailed voting results. A day earlier, another Maduro ally, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, joined U.S. President Joe Biden in calling for “the immediate release of full, transparent and detailed polling station-level voting data.”

The Brazilian president’s office declined to comment Wednesday on whether the Supreme Court audit would amount to an independent verification of the election results, citing instead a Foreign Ministry statement released Monday.

The statement said the Brazilian government was waiting for “the publication by the National Electoral Council of data broken down by polling station, a necessary step to ensure the transparency, credibility and legitimacy of the election results.”

Lula said Tuesday of Maduro that “the more transparency there is, the greater his chances for peace and governing Venezuela.”

Machado said opposition poll results show Gonzalez received about 6.2 million votes compared with 2.7 million for Maduro. That differs significantly from the electoral council’s report that Maduro received 5.1 million votes, compared with more than 4.4 million for Gonzalez.

“The serious doubts that have emerged around the Venezuelan electoral process risk leading society to a deep and violent polarization, the grave consequences of which could result in lasting division,” Petro said Wednesday in a post on the social networking site X.

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

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

The Organization of American States was scheduled to convene a meeting on Wednesday to discuss elections in Venezuela.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy, but the country went into free fall after Maduro took power in 2013. Plunging oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation of more than 130,000 percent led to social unrest and mass emigration.

More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014, the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history, with many settling in Colombia.

Speaking to journalists in Vietnam on Wednesday, the EU’s foreign policy chief said the bloc would not recognize Maduro’s election victory without independent verification of the voting records.

“They should be delivered immediately, as in any democratic electoral process,” said Josep Borrell.

Within hours of the electoral council declaring Maduro’s victory, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Caracas and other cities. The protests, which continued into Tuesday, at times turned violent, and law enforcement responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Foro Penal, a Venezuelan human rights organization, said 11 people, including two minors, were killed in election-related violence.

Maduro’s closest allies in the ruling party quickly came to his defense. National Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodriguez — his chief negotiator in the dialogues with the U.S. and the opposition — insisted that Maduro was the undisputed winner and called his opponents brutal fascists. He called for the arrests of Machado and Gonzalez.

In a post in Spanish on the X portal, EU MEP Borrell called on the Venezuelan authorities to “end the detentions, repression and brutal rhetoric against members of the opposition”.

Meanwhile, Machado and Gonzalez appealed to their supporters to remain calm.

“I ask Venezuelans to continue with peace, demanding that the result be respected and that the result sheets be published,” González said in X. “This victory, which belongs to all of us, will unite us and reconcile us as a nation.”