CARACAS, Venezuela
Venezuela’s Supreme Court has backed President Nicolás Maduro’s claimsthat he won last month’s presidential election and said voting tallies published online showing he lost by a landslide were forged.
The ruling is the latest attempt by Maduro to blunt protests and international criticism that erupted after the contested July 28 vote in which the self-proclaimed socialist leader was seeking a third, six-year term.
The high court is packed with
Maduro loyalists and has almost never ruled against the government.
Its decision, read Thursday in
an event attended by senior officials and foreign diplomats, came in response
to a request by Maduro to review vote totals showing he had won by more than 1
million votes.
The main opposition coalition
has accused Maduro of trying to steal the vote.
Thanks to a superb ground game
on election day, opposition volunteers managed to collect copies of voting
tallies from 80% of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide and which show
opposition candidate Edmundo
González won by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
The official tally
sheets printed by each voting machine carry a QR code that makes it
easy for anyone to verify the results and are almost impossible to replicate.
“An attempt to judicialize the
results doesn’t change the truth: we won overwhelmingly and we have the voting
records to prove it,” González, standing before a Venezuelan flag, said in a
video posted on social media.
The high court’s ruling
certifying the results contradicts the findings of experts from the United
Nations and the Carter Center who were invited to observe the election and
which both determined the results announced by authorities lacked credibility.
Specifically, the outside experts noted that authorities didn’t release a
breakdown of results by each of the 30,000 voting booths nationwide, as they
have in almost every previous election.
The government has claimed —
without evidence — that a foreign cyberattack staged by hackers from North
Macedonia delayed the vote counting on election night and publication of the
disaggregated results.
González was the only one of
10 candidates who did not participate in the Supreme Court’s audit, a fact
noted by the justices, who in their ruling accused him of trying to spread
panic.
The former diplomat and his
chief backer, opposition powerhouse Maria Corina Machado, went into hiding
after the election as security forces arrested more than 2,000 people and
cracked down on demonstrations that erupted spontaneously throughout the country
protesting the results.
Numerous foreign governments,
including the U.S. as well as several allies of Maduro, have called on
authorities to release the full breakdown of results.
Gabriel Boric, the leftist
president of Chile and one of the main critics of Maduro’s election gambit,
lambasted the high court’s certification.
“Today, Venezuela’s TSJ has
finally consolidated the fraud,” he said on his X account referring to the
initials of the high court. “The Maduro regime obviously welcomes with
enthusiasm its ruling… there is no doubt that we are facing a dictatorship that
falsifies elections.”
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