MIAMI.- After a long wait, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council declared dictator Nicolás Maduro the winner and said the trend was irreversible.
However, Venezuelan journalist Eugenio Martínez, an expert on Venezuelan political issues, points out that the CNE, which serves the regime, had “two basic problems” with the announcement by rector Elvis Amoroso.
The highest authority of the electoral “referee” proclaimed the dictator for a third consecutive six-year term with 5.15 million votes (51.2%), after the counting of 80% of the votes. González Urrutia received 4.45 million votes (44.2%), according to this first bulletin.
Amoroso began his announcement by saying that it was “an irreversible trend,” but there is still a chance that the outcome could change.
“There are two basic problems with the CNE president’s announcement. 1) Although he called them irreversible, a simple arithmetic operation serves to prove that this is not the case. 2) The results so far – Monday 2:32am – are not auditable,” Martínez wrote in X.
After the results were known, Juan Barreto, a former ally of Chavismo but now a critic of the dictatorship, also pointed out inconsistencies with a mathematical operation he performed on his social networks.
“Forgive my ignorance in mathematics… But I need you to please explain it to me again, I’m slow. Number of voters 21,105,157, % participation 59%. 59% represents 12,452,042. Maduro: 5,150,092; 7,301,959 remaining; Edmundo 4,445,978.”
“There are 2,855,972 left,” he continued in his post. “Other (candidates) 462,704; There are 2,393,268 left. Who got those almost 2 and a half million votes?” Barreto questioned.
Following the CNE’s announcement, the international community has rejected the results and called for a recount, while opposition leader Maria Corina Machado declared that “González Urrutia obtained 70% of the votes and Nicolás Maduro 30%. This is the truth. Congratulations, Edmundo.”
“We won and everyone knows it,” Machado said at a press conference. “We want to tell all of Venezuela and the world that Venezuela has a new president-elect and it is Edmundo González Urrutia.”
