One of Venezuela’s top election officials, in a statement sure to shake a crisis-weary country, said in an interview that he had no evidence that Venezuela’s authoritarian president won last month’s election.
Since the July 28 vote, governments around the world have expressed skepticism, even disbelief, about President Nicolás Maduro’s victory. But the statement by Juan Carlos Delpino — a member of the government body that announced Maduro’s victory — represents the first major criticism from within the electoral system.
Speaking in an interview with a journalist for the first time since the vote, Delpino said he had “received no evidence” that Maduro had won a majority of the vote.
Neither the electoral body nor Maduro have released tallies to support claims the president won re-election, while the opposition has released tally sheets from thousands of voting machines showing its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, won by a landslide.
By declaring Maduro the winner without proof, the country’s electoral body “failed the country,” Delpino said. “I am ashamed and I apologize to the Venezuelan population because the entire plan that was woven to have elections accepted by all was not achieved.”
Delpino, a lawyer and one of two opposition-aligned electoral council members, spoke from hiding, fearful of government backlash. In recent weeks, Maduro’s security forces have rounded up anyone who appears to doubt his bid to remain in power for another six years, and many Venezuelans fear his forces are crossing borders to pursue his enemies.
The National Electoral Council, known in Venezuela as CNE, is the five-member body in charge of deciding the framework of the elections, as well as receiving and announcing the results. These functions give it enormous power.
When the country’s legislature selected Delpino as a council member last August, many in Venezuela saw it as an attempt to give it a veneer of balance and legitimacy.
At the time, Delpino was living in the United States and returned to Venezuela to join the council because of his “high levels of commitment” to the democratic process, he said.
Most in the country believed the council was controlled by Maduro. However, Delpino, a member of the long-time opposition party, Acción Democrática, said he agreed to join the council because he believed the “electoral route” was the path to change.
A spokeswoman for the National Electoral Council did not respond to a request for comment.
The July vote pitted Maduro, whose socialist-inspired movement has been in power for 25 years, against Edmundo Gonzalez, a previously little-known diplomat who enjoyed the backing of a popular opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado.
Just hours after polls closed on Election Day, the president of the electoral council, Elvis Amoroso, a long-time member of Maduro’s party, declared Maduro the winner with barely more than half the votes.
That same night, Delpino decided to stop participating in the council, he said, and did not appear at the press conference announcing Maduro’s victory.
Although Amoroso has yet to present documents proving Maduro won, the opposition compiled the paper tally from more than 25,000 voting machines on July 28.
Those 25,000 tally sheets — representing more than 80 percent of all machines used on Election Day — showed Gonzalez had obtained 67 percent of the vote. In recent weeks, the opposition has published those tallies on its website.
Delpino declined to say whether he had access to the voting data received by the government.
But in a message he said he planned to post on X after his interview with the Times, Delpino cited a long list of irregularities that led to “a loss of confidence in the integrity of the process and in the announced results.”
These irregularities, he wrote, include:
- The refusal of the National Electoral Council to publish the results machine by machine.
- Reports of vote witnesses being expelled from polling stations as they closed, preventing them from monitoring the final moments of voting.
- A disruption in the electronic transmission of voting results from voting machines to the council’s data centre. (This could create an opening for data manipulation.)
- The “worrying lack” of board meetings in the months leading up to the vote, which led Amoroso to make “unilateral” decisions about the process. This made it difficult for Delpino to oppose policies that tilted the election in Maduro’s favor, such as barriers to registration abroad.
On the morning of the vote, Delpino woke up optimistic, he said in the interview, and was at the electoral council headquarters in Caracas by 6 a.m. But at the end of the day, when he realized Amoroso was going to announce an “irreversible” victory for Maduro without evidence, he went home, he said, rather than participate in the announcement.
Since the day of the vote, Diosdado Cabello, one of Maduro’s most powerful allies and vice president of his party, has accused Delpino of being part of “this little group of terrorists” who hacked the electoral system in an attempt to rig a victory for González.
(The month before the election, Delpino had criticized Amoroso’s management of the electoral council to a local media outlet, Efecto Cocuyo, which contributed to him being singled out as a target of the ruling party.)
The United States has recognized Gonzalez as the winner of the election, and even the governments of Colombia and Brazil — led by leftist leaders like Maduro — have expressed “serious doubts” that Maduro has won.
They have all asked Maduro and the National Electoral Council to publish the results by voting tables.
Two independent panels monitoring Venezuela’s elections, one from the United Nations and the other from the Carter Center, have said they failed to meet minimum standards for a democratic vote.
If Maduro is sworn in again in January, his move will extend his time in power into a third decade. Under the president and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, the oil-rich country has experienced an extraordinary economic decline, with mismanagement, corruption and U.S. sanctions destroying the economy.
Maduro is under investigation by the International Criminal Court for human rights crimes and is wanted by the United States for drug trafficking.
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Since the vote, some Venezuelans have pressed Delpino to speak out and criticized him for taking weeks to do so. Delpino said he was doing so now because of his commitment to transparency.
In the years as Chavez and then Maduro consolidated their control, some opposition members have advocated a military coup or foreign intervention.
But Delpino said that despite everything he had seen in recent weeks, he thought elections were the answer to a better future. “I still believe today that Venezuela’s exit is democratic,” he said.
“The solution is electoral, with another protagonist in the CNE, without a doubt,” he said in reference to Amoroso, “but I believe in that solution.”
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