Venezuelan opposition says they now can prove Maduro was overwhelmingly defeated
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Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said on Monday that her team had gathered enough evidence to prove that strongman Nicolás Maduro was resoundingly defeated in the country’s presidential election.
Machado, whose support was the main force behind the campaign of opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González, said supporters had compiled more than 70% of the final vote counts provided by polling stations upon the conclusion of voting on Sunday — documents known as actas de votación.
She said the information gathered leaves no doubt that the great majority of Venezuelans voted in favor of ending more than two decades of socialist rule.
“We now have the means to prove the truth of what happened yesterday in our election,” Machado said in a press conference. “In this moment … we have 73.2% of the registries, and with the results they provide, our president-elect is Edmundo González.”
Machado said the actas show that the results were so overwhelmingly in González’s favor that Maduro could not have caught him even if every other vote had gone to the embattled Venezuelan ruler.
“The vote difference in our favor is huge and we won in all states,” she said.
According to the numbers gathered by the opposition so far, Maduro obtained only 2.76 million votes, while González obtained 6.27 million. Machado said she was confident that Gonzalez’s lead, amounting to more than 65% of all votes, will be sustained once they get all the actas, which she hopes will happen tomorrow.
More than 15,700 stations were set up in Venezuela to receive more than 21 million registered voters, although an estimated four million of them are believed to have left the South American country.
Machado’s pronouncement disputes the results announced early Monday morning by the regime-controlled National Electorate Council (CNE), which said that Maduro had won the election by obtaining 51.2% of the votes. The council said it had tallied the results appearing in 80% of the registries.
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According to the council’s numbers, González only obtained 44.2% of the votes.
The council’s announcement sets up Maduro for a third presidential term that would expire in 2031 and that would extend into a third decade the socialist revolution initiated by his predecessor and mentor, the late president Hugo Chávez.
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However, González and Machado immediately questioned the results announced by the council, pointing out that the data they had received directly from the CNE — before the election authority halted the process without explanation — that showed González was ahead with 70% of the vote compared to barely 30% for Maduro.
“It is impossible,” said Machado referring to the announced results, adding that it was a crude lie that seeks to hide the truth plain to all Venezuelans: that Gonzalez “obtained the largest margin of votes in a presidential election in the history of Venezuela.”
