The Venezuelan Public Ministry announced this Wednesday (25) the opening of a formal investigation into the primary elections held by the opposition to the Nicolás Maduro regime last Sunday (22). Candidate María Corina Machado, former deputy and disqualified by the Chavista regime, won the opposition dispute with 92% of the votes, which made her the new representative of the opposition bloc in the 2024 presidential elections.
Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, who is linked to Chavismo, appointed two investigators specializing in organized crimes to investigate what he denounced as “fraud” in the elections, where 2.3 million people participated, according to official data from the organizers.
Saab stated that there are “numerous allegations of fraud that compromise the integrity of the process”, citing a video released by the Maduro regime in which some people get “confused” during the count at one of the 5,000 voting tables.
The Public Ministry presumes that at least “four crimes were committed on Sunday”, including “usurpation of functions, usurpation of identity, money laundering and association to commit a crime”. The president of the National Primary Commission (CNP), Jesús María Casa, the vice-president Mildred Camero, and the 24 heads of the regional boards will be “summoned as witnesses in the coming days to account”, announced the MP.
Saab also highlighted that the Venezuelan Parliament, controlled by the Chavistas, denounced on Tuesday (24) “irregularities in the primaries”, including an alleged “manipulation of the number of votes”.
In addition to Parliament’s complaint, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro also accused the opposition primaries of having been rigged. The dictator’s complaint was corroborated by his wife, Cilia Flores; by the first vice-president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Psuv), Diosdado Cabello, and by the president of the 2020 National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez.
In this Wednesday’s announcement, Saab also emphasized that the Primary Commission should have accepted technical assistance from the National Electoral Council (CNE) to “guarantee the transparency of the process”. The refusal of the Primary Commission was one of the reasons that led the Chavistas to accuse their opponents of the crime of “usurpation of functions”.
The attorney general argued that the CNE has an obligation to intervene in elections of political organizations, adding that the refusal to accept automated voting, proposed by the CNE, was a “violation of the principle of one voter, one vote”. Saab highlighted that the manual system used in these primaries is a practice “outdated in Venezuela”.
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