Caracas, Venezuela — Following a day of mostly silence, Venezuela’s electoral authority announced in the waning Sunday hours that its authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro had won presidential elections with 51.2% of the vote compared to 44.2% for opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia.
The news seemed to initially deflate many Venezuelans who were cautiously optimistic that, for the first time in over a decade, Venezuela could transition from authoritarian rule and democratically elect a new leader.
Following the announcement and initial uncertainty as to how the opposition and electorate would respond to Maduro’s proclaimed victory, the opposition began to slowly build a case for fraud in the elections on behalf of the government, relying on voting data they say has been withheld from them by officials.
During the day on Monday, anti-government protests also broke out in parts of the country, and Maduro’s government gave unsubstantiated claims of election hacking.
Here’s what has happened since Maduro’s proclamation of victory:
Venezuelan opposition disputes election results
In the early hours of Monday morning, María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader who was banned from running in these elections by the government but has been the driving force of the opposition movement nonetheless, addressed the National Electoral Council (CNE)’s announcement.
“Venezuela has a new president-elect, and it’s Edmundo González, and everybody knows it. We have won in all states of the country,” Machado said.
During a press conference, Machado said that just 40% of voting tabulations had been delivered to the opposition by the CNE, and that even with just 40% of tabulations, the results show that “Edmundo González Urrutia achieved 70% of the vote in this election and Nicolas Maduro 30%.”
News website Caracas Chronicles provides a great explanation of the tabulations, or “actas” as they’re known in Spanish. According to the site, for all of Venezuela’s 30,026 voting tables, the CNE is required to print out a physical copy of voting tabulations before results are digitally sent to the CNE. Citizen poll watchers for all parties must sign the tabulations.
Early Monday morning, with less than half of the voting tabulations in hand, the opposition urged their poll watchers to remain inside voting centers until all voting data had been delivered.
González Urrutia and Machado told their supporters to head to voting centers “in peace and as families” to support the process.
Without inciting violence, or calling for mass protests, the opposition’s candidate González Urrutia said, “Our message of reconciliation and change in peace remains in force.”
The Carter Center, one of the international election observers allowed to monitor results, on Monday called on the CNE “to immediately publish the presidential election results at the polling station level.”
Isolated protests erupt across the country
On Monday morning, Venezuela awoke to spontaneous “cacerolazos” — a form of protest adopted in Chile in the 1970s and now widely seen across Latin America in which citizens bang on pots and pans in protest. From 10:30AM until 12:00PM, cacerolazos were reported throughout Caracas in rejection of the CNE’s results.
By noon, reports of street protests began. In Caracas, the La Guaira highway, which accesses the city’s international airport, was blocked by protestors. A reporter for Latin America Reports, on his way to catch a flight at the airport, was turned around and forced to head back to his hotel until further notice.
Protesters throughout the country took down Maduro banners, stomping, stabbing and burning them. In the coastal state of Falcón, a statue of Hugo Chávez (Maduro’s predecessor and political mentor) was torn down, followed by others across the country.
Some residents of Petare, one of the largest slums in Latin America, mobilized against the government, rejecting the election results. By 2:40PM the protesters started walking toward West Caracas for kilometers until they arrived at Chacaito, in central-eastern Caracas, via Francisco de Miranda avenue. The New York Times’s Anatoly Kurmanaev shared on X that even traditional Chavismo strongholds in central Caracas saw anti-government protesting.
At 5:10PM there were reports that the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) was deployed to Francisco de Miranda Avenue, repressing the protestors with tear gas and non-lethal pellets. There were other reports of clashes between protesters and the Bolivarian National Police (PNB) in Caracas.
It appears that the protests that erupted on Monday were spontaneous, and not officially organized by any political party. Unfortunately, NGO Foro Penal reported that by 9:00PM, at least one person had been killed in the state of Yaracuy, and 46 people had been arrested across eight states. From July 26 to 28, the NGO reported that one person was killed and 48 people were arrested related to the electoral process.
Other deaths were reported in Maracay, the capital of the northern Aragua state, where 30-year-old Rancés Cerra was assassinated and in the northwestern Zulia state, where a 15-year-old died from a gunshot wound, both were reportedly participating in civilian protests.
The opposition announces updated voter tabulation data
At 6:30PM on Monday, Machado and González Urrutia announced that the opposition had obtained 73.2% of the voting tabulations. According to Machado, the data affirmed that González Urrutia’s victory was “mathematically irrefutable.”
According to the opposition, González Urrutia received 6,275,182 votes to Maduro’s 2,759,256. Machado said that, even if the CNE reported that the remaining missing voting tabulations were in favor of Maduro, he still could not win the elections mathematically.
Machado announced that her team had created a website with the tabulations that are in the opposition’s possession, where citizens can input their identification and validate their vote. “There are various international leaders that are consulting this website,” she added.
The political leader also called on Venezuelans — including children and elderly — to peacefully gather on Tuesday between 11:00AM and 12:00PM to defend their vote, signaling that the opposition is relying on peaceful protest and international support to help them overturn the official results of Sunday’s election.
What has Maduro’s government done?
Following the Maduro administration’s bizarre victory party in front of the Miraflores Palace on Sunday night — an affair which included bands crooning Maduro-themed tunes — the president spent much of the day sharing congratulatory messages from his international allies, including Russia’s Vladamir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and leaders from Iran, Serbia, Nicaragua and Cuba.
At 11:00AM, Attorney General Tarek William Saab issued a statement supporting the CNE’s results and accusing the opposition of staging an attack on the CNE’s data transmission system to manipulate the votes.
According to Saab, “The failed attack was carried out from North Macedonia” and was led by Lester Toledo, a Venezuelan lawyer and political consultant, along with opposition leaders Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado.
The official provided no further evidence, and the announcement came a day after Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yvan Gil denounced meddling from international actors in Venezuela’s elections, mentioning the Lima Group as well as U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, in an apparent attempt to get out in front of the opposition to make claims for election irregularities.
Monday night, Maduro addressed Venezuelans for over an hour, denouncing the “extreme right” and claiming that violent protestors that had been captured were criminals and drug addicts, and some were sent on deportation flights from the United States, without offering evidence.
