- António Guterres, secretary general of the organization, urged the “breakdown by voting stations” of the election results
UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday called for electoral “transparency” in Venezuela and said that the panel of experts invited to observe the process is continuing with its mandate following the publication, last Tuesday, of an interim report.
Guterres’ spokesman Farhan Haq said at his daily briefing that the panel’s draft document “was made public under the authority of the secretary-general as part of a normal procedure in line with the organization’s transparency policies.”
Guterres “reiterates his call for transparency and encourages the publication of the electoral results and the breakdown by voting station” in Venezuela, he added.
The panel is continuing with the technical aspects of the remaining phases of the electoral process, as per its terms of reference, and will submit a final report to the secretary general,” which is confidential, Haq said.
UN panel of experts: Venezuela’s elections have no credibility
The United Nations General Secretariat published on Tuesday, August 13 the preliminary report of the UN panel of electoral experts which concluded that the presidential elections of July 28 did not “meet the basic standards of transparency and integrity” and that “they are essential for the holding of credible elections.”
The document explains that the development of the elections, as well as the publication of results, “did not follow the legal provisions and did not comply with all the stipulated deadlines.”
“In the panel’s experience, the announcement of an election result without the publication of its details or the disclosure of tabulated results to the candidates is unprecedented in contemporary democratic elections. This had a negative impact on the confidence in the result announced by the National Electoral Council among a large part of the Venezuelan electorate,” the report reads.
Experts described the July 28 election as “well organized logistically” and that the CNE “was able to quickly detect and resolve the vast majority of minor technical problems that were reported during the day.”
The panel found that the “electronic voting system was well designed and reliable” and that the Venezuelan electoral authority had also implemented a “robust mechanism for the results transmission process with several levels of protection against unauthorized connections and cyberattacks.”
The delegation said that the electronic transmission of results “worked well initially, but was abruptly stopped in the hours after the polling stations closed, with no information being provided to the public.”
At the time of announcing the results, the president of the CNE (Elvis Amoroso) declared that a terrorist cyberattack had affected the transmission and caused a delay in the tabulation process. However, the CNE postponed and subsequently cancelled three key post-election audits, including one on the communication system that could have shed light on the occurrence of external attacks against the transmission infrastructure,” the panel of experts stated.
The mission alleged that the announcements of the results of the July 28 presidential elections were offered in “oral communications without infographic support” and stated that the CNE “did not publish, and has not yet published, any results (or results broken down by voting table) to support its oral announcements, as contemplated in the electoral legal framework.”
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2024-08-17 00:39:09
