- The Electoral Chamber issued a ruling in which it asks the electoral body to also provide evidence of the alleged cyber attack that its system suffered during the transmission of the minutes.
The Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) issued ruling No. 026 on August 2. In said resolution, it requests the National Electoral Council (CNE) to deliver within a period of three business days all instruments related to the aggregation of the results of the presidential elections of July 28.
The documents requested by the court are: the minutes of the scrutiny of the electoral tables at the national level and the minutes of the final total of the process. Also the minutes of adjudication and proclamation in which the CNE declared Nicolás Maduro the winner with 51.9%according to the second bulletin issued by the organization.
The court also requested that all evidence that the CNE has of the alleged cyber attack reported by the government and suffered by the computer system on the night of July 28, slowing down the process of transmitting the minutes, be recorded.
“In light of the commitment to peace, democracy and in pursuit of the constitutional order of the Republic, this Electoral Chamber decides that for this particular case, the work of this body is authorized from Monday to Sunday, both days inclusive, 24 hours a day,” concludes the ruling.
Contentious appeal
Sentence No. 026 was issued after several of the former candidates who participated in the elections appeared before the TSJ for an electoral contentious appeal filed by Nicolás Maduro himself. The president of the organization, Caryslia Rodríguez, summoned them to deliver their respective minutes and begin an investigation and verification of the results, after five days in which the CNE has not published the results at each polling station, alluding to the alleged hacking.
However, during the event, Rodriguez issued a ruling in which certified the results as “irreversible”. He also made the candidates present sign a notification act in which they committed to respect the election results. The only candidate who refused to sign It was Enrique Marquezwho reiterated in a subsequent press conference his demand for an independent audit of the CNE minutes.
“I don’t know what this is about (…) I must inform the country that I refused to sign the notification act because I don’t feel notified of anything. The notification must be accompanied by the appeal, with the reasons why I am included in a summons,” he declared.
Candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, recognized by six countries so far as the true winner of the elections according to the minutes collected by the opposition, was not present at the hearing. The Unitary Platform pointed out that the resource introduced by Maduro does not exist in Venezuelan legislation, and that the Electoral Chamber cannot assume the powers of the CNE to total and proclaim the winner of an election.
Cyber attack
When the results were announced on July 28, the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, denounced that the organization’s private network had suffered a cyberattack that had delayed the transmission of the minutes, which led him to issue the first bulletin with 80% of the tables counted. Hours later, the government’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, declared that he had discovered that the hacking had occurred from North Macedonia, with opposition leader Lester Toledo as the alleged mastermind.
However, the Macedonian government issued a statement denying the prosecutor’s statementsand stating that they never received a request from Venezuela to investigate the events. On the other hand, organizations such as the Carter Center also considered it “impossible” that the electoral system could be subject to an external attack, since it is located on a private network of the state-owned company CANTV, completely isolated from the Internet.
On the other hand, the cybersecurity company Kaspersky reported that There were no reports of attacks distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks in Venezuela during monitoring from July 25 to 31.
Recently, versions about the origin of the hack have changed among government spokesmen. Nicolás Maduro attributed it to the technological magnate Elon Musk, while Diosdado Cabello assured that it was a plan orchestrated by the former rectors of the CNE Roberto Picón, Vicente Díaz and Enrique Márquez, as well as by the current rector Juan Carlos Delpino, who did not refuse to accompany Amoroso in the first bulletin and has not appeared publicly since then.
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2024-08-03 06:30:07
