The Carter Center said late on Tuesday it could not verify the results of Venezuela’s disputed election.
In which the authority proclaimed President Nicolás Maduro the winner, and pointed to the “lack of transparency” of the electoral body in the disclosure of the results.
The election “does not conform to international parameters and standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic,” the Atlanta-based organization said in a broadcast.
The National Electoral Opinion invited the Carter Center to observe the elections following the signing of the Barbados treaty in October 2023. The only international observers allowed to go to the polls were the Center and a small delegation from the United Nations, which has so far not commented on the results of the elections.
The Carter Nucleus’ position was released at a time when the international community has increased its pressure on Venezuela with criticism of the lack of transparency and demands that Maduro and the CNE reveal electoral records. There were also two days of protests in volume from opponents who say that their candidate, Edmundo González, defeated the current president and solemn candidate.
The Carter Center sent 17 experts and observers to Venezuela on June 29, with teams based in four cities: Caracas, Valencia, Maracaibo, and Barinas.
“The Carter Center cannot verify or corroborate the authenticity of the presidential election results declared by the National Electoral Opinion (CNE),” the organization said in its broadcast of just over a page.
In the written statement, the Carter Center said that international standards were not met at any stage of the electoral process and that it “violated several precepts of national law itself.”
Hours earlier, Maduro defended his victory in the presidential palace elections and challenged opposition leader María Corina Machado to show her face, after she demanded that the electoral domain publish the voting records.
Accompanied by a rally of supporters, he reprimanded the opposition leader for confronting him directly. “Come and get me,” he said from the balcony of the Miraflores palace.
Machado met in the morning in front of thousands of supporters in eastern Caracas and demanded that Venezuela’s National Electoral Opinion make the voting records for Sunday’s elections transparent so that it can be verified if Maduro won or if, since he defends the opposition, Edmundo González had the most votes.
Maduro also assured that he will maintain his willingness to mobilize police and military in the protests that have increased in the capital and in several other parts of the country since Monday against the results announced by the National Electoral Opinion.
The CNE declared Maduro the winner of a third six-year proxy on Monday morning and made it official hours later.
The OAS on Tuesday asked Nicolás Maduro to admit the guide or ask for a new more transparent vote and the European Union questioned why access to the verification of the results was not granted.
Shortly before the Carter Center published its broadcast, U.S. President Joe Biden and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, spoke by phone and called on the Maduro government to immediately release “the complete, detailed and transparent election results.”
The voting data was questioned from the beginning by the opposition. Machado said on Tuesday that, according to 84% of the minutes in the opposition’s possession, it was Edmundo González who won the elections with a 70% advantage and not Nicolás Maduro.
“Today Venezuela has its president,” Machado said in the middle of an event in the streets of Caracas as he raised his hand to González, a 74-year-old former diplomat, who was incognito in the world of politics shortly before taking office as an opposition candidate, given Machado’s impossibility to participate in the electoral dispute due to a political disqualification against him for 15 years.
Maduro later said that González had been a U.S. CIA agent since the 1980s and that he had participated in El Salvador’s death squads when he was a diplomat stationed there.
The website of the National Electoral Opinion, where the results of the elections are published, had been down for two days and had not reached the minutes since at least Monday, despite international criticism of transparency and protests by citizens to know the details of the votes.
From the European Union, the High Representative for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, questioned that the CNE pronounced Maduro’s victory with 80% of the vote count and “without providing any source or system that allows its verification”.