Caracas Chronicles

After the CNE declared (and today ratified) Nicolás Maduro’s victory with 51.2% of the votes―a figure that several foreign governments question and María Corina Machado calls fraudulent―the ball is in the opposition’s court. 

Machado asserts that a total of four independent quick counts, which her central committee reviewed, statistically proved that Edmundo González won in a landslide with 70% of the votes. Quick counts (also known as parallel vote tabulations) estimate the number of votes that candidates received, providing a check against official figures reported by the state. Eugenio Martínez, a leading electoral expert, just claimed that Elvis Amoroso’s report from last night was printed in his office―not in the CNE’s totalization center. 

The next few hours may prove historic. This is the first time since Hugo Chávez took power in 1999 that the opposition is adamant that they can dissect and expose a purported fraud in a national vote. The large-scale deployment of witnesses (or voting center representatives of political parties) throughout yesterday’s election was the crucial step to reach this point.

For now, both the military and the ruling party’s leadership  seems to be on board with Amoroso’s results, but Nicolás Maduro is in hot water. We may be set for the next big leap: the disclosure of official voting records that can disaggregate the results in each of the country’s voting tables.

There were 30,026 voting tables in this election, spread across 15,797 voting centers. All votes must be recorded in actas, or voting tallies: printed documents that establish the total votes for every candidate at a voting table. Voting machines produce a printed tally at each voting center before those tallies are sent back to the CNE’s headquarters in Caracas. Witnesses representing all candidates at a voting table must sign that print-out. 

After a tally or acta is printed and signed, the machines connect to the internet to send the data electronically to the CNE, which puts up the tally on its website.

The CNE’s website has been down the entire day. There’s no public access to results at each table. In several polling stations, CNE officials and Plan República soldiers prevented tallies from being printed, or took them away forcibly. The opposition won’t be able to process those actas.  

However, the Unitary Platform may be able to collect enough of them to prove that González won, and by a landslide, as it is alleging. At 1 am last night, Maria Corina Machado said they had 40% of the tallies with them; today, they are working on getting more to sustain their case.

While people are taking to the streets in many cities and Maduro orders repression, the figure war gains momentum. Gustavo Rojas Matute, a Washington-based Venezuelan economist, just tweeted that the Unitary Platform has processed almost two thirds of the voting record. So far, they show Maduro trailing González Urrutia by 2.9 million votes.

Machado and González Urrutia announced a press conference for 6 pm. In the last hours, more and more governments, the European Union, the UN Secretary General and the Carter Center have increased the pressure on the CNE to publish detailed accounts, table by table, of all votes. Precisely what the opposition is looking for.