Venezuela’s Supreme Court recognised on Thursday the results of the presidential election, with incumbent head of state Nicolas Maduro declared the winner, Venezuelan media reported.
The electoral chamber of the Supreme Court verified polling station protocols and other documents from former presidential candidates and political parties. It is alleged that former opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, who is considered by Western countries to be the winner of the election, failed to appear before the electoral chamber of the Supreme Court and did not provide the required documents.
The court’s ruling, announced on Thursday at an event attended by senior officials and foreign diplomats, came in response to Maduro’s request for a review of the election results showing he won by a margin of more than 1 million votes.
Opposition blames Maduro
The main opposition coalition accused Maduro of trying to steal the vote. On election day, opposition volunteers managed to collect copies of voting protocols from 80 per cent of the 30,000 polling stations across the country that show opposition candidate Edmundo González won by a margin of more than 2 to 1. The official protocols printed by each voting machine contain a QR code that makes the results easy to verify and virtually impossible to copy.
The High Court’s order certifying the results contradicts the findings of experts from the United Nations and the Carter Centre, who were invited to observe the elections and determined that the results announced by the authorities were not credible. In particular, the outside experts noted that the authorities failed to publish results for each of the 30,000 polling stations across the country, as was the case in almost all previous elections.
The government claimed that a foreign cyberattack by hackers from North Macedonia delayed the counting of votes on election night and the publication of results broken down by precinct.
Nine Latin American nations – Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay – issued a joint statement calling for a review of the results in the presence of independent observers. The US also questioned the results of the presidential election and threatened Maduro with accountability for refusing to hand over power.
