The minutes of the election results in Venezuela continue to be at the center of the new legitimacy crisis that the Government of Nicolás Maduro has faced two months ago. A good part of the international community continues to ask them to officially recognize the re-election of the Chavista leader in the July 28 elections. The opposition has published its copies on a website with free access to citizens, data analysts and journalists, according to which they obtained a victory with 67% of the votes. Now, the Carter Center, which sent specialists to observe the process, presented them this Wednesday before the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington.
“These minutes are key elements, I have just received the originals that were sent to me by international mail. These are original records from Venezuela,” said Jennie Lincoln, who was the head of the Carter Center electoral mission that traveled to Venezuela in July, who assured that according to these documents the winner was Edmundo González Urrutia, as the opposition defends.
After leaving the country after its observation, the international organization had already presented a harsh preliminary report in which it indicated that the process carried out in Venezuela could not be considered democratic, according to what was collected by 17 experts deployed in Caracas, Barinas, Maracaibo and Valencia. This and other conclusions were presented by Lincoln during the session in which he explained that although the Venezuelan electoral system is electronic, the machines print a record that serves as proof of the result of each voting station that is delivered to witnesses from all parties. to the Republic Plan, the military contingent that guards the process and to the National Electoral Council (CNE) itself, which on July 29 proclaimed Maduro without showing them.
“The minutes are public documents that are sent to the CNE. Copies of them are printed immediately at the table and provided to all election witnesses and observers. All political parties can calculate vote totals based on the minutes they collect from the 30,000 tables. These minutes are key documents. They were analyzed by the opposition and by independent international missions and show that they are the original minutes of July 28 and they give Edmundo González as the winner with more than 60% of the votes,” said Lincoln while showing some of the long ballots and pointing out the its security codes such as QR that ensure its authenticity.
In his speech at the session, the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, said that the electoral process was from the beginning “a series of the worst things that can be committed.” “As expected, it was neither free, nor fair, nor transparent, as expected, it was done regarding the violation of signed agreements,” he added in reference to the Barbados agreements – of which this month marks one year – in which that the Maduro Government was committed, among other things, to allowing the participation of all candidates and finally decided to disqualify its main rival, María Corina Machado, later replaced by Edmundo González Urrutia.
The Venezuelan electoral referee is in default with the obligations imposed by law to publish the results disaggregated by table on his website and also in the Electoral Gazette, 30 days after the elections. Maduro, after proclaiming himself the winner, took the conflict to the Supreme Court, part of the institutional apparatus that he controls. The magistrates decided to carry out an expert report to validate the results that have allowed him to remain in power. The process was carried out in fifteen days and state television was in charge of showing images of the specialists with masks, visors and gloves manipulating alleged documents delivered by the CNE and other political parties that participated in the election, with the exception of the opposition coalition that supports to Edmundo González Urrutia. In journalistic investigations by the Armando Info portal, it was revealed that the procedure was carried out by officials of the electoral body itself and not by independent experts.
The Maduro government fled forward amid suspicions of fraud. The day after the elections, he repressed citizen protests against the results, imprisoned more than 1,700 people and went against the opposition for publishing their copies of the official minutes that they managed to obtain from 83.5% of the polling stations, after confronting obstacles to their work on election night. Chavismo’s argument has been that only the CNE can give results, even though in 2013 the United Socialism Party of Venezuela also decided to publish them on its website. They have also said that what the opposition spread is a falsification. These accusations ended in a criminal investigation that ended in the arrest warrant against the candidate González Urrutia and which was archived, after he was forced to go into exile in Madrid at the beginning of September.
#Carter #Center #presents #OAS #original #minutes #vote #Venezuela #grant #victory #Edmundo #González