Caracas Chronicles

This piece was originally published in Spanish on Cazadores de Fake News, it is part of the initiative #LaHoraDeVenezuela

In a press conference held by President Nicolás Maduro with international media, Jorge Rodríguez, speaker of the National Assembly and head of Maduro’s campaign command, tried to prove that the voting tallies, or actas, presented by the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia’s campaign and Unitary Platform (PUD), confirming his victory in the election held on July 28, are fraudulent. 

Rodriguez stated that such records are inadmissible because they present errors such as stains, folds, imperfections, “flat signatures,” and the absence of signatures from table members, witnesses, or voting machine operators. His arguments are aimed at criminalizing the opposition, while diverting attention away from the original demand: that the National Electoral Council (CNE) publish the actas they possess, to cross-check them with those presented by the PUD. 

Jorge Rodríguez used a series of misleading and contradictory statements to try to delegitimize the tallies presented by the PUD, including claims about procedures that the chavista regime had previously used to its favor. In an interruption during Rodríguez’s presentation, Nicolás Maduro stated that the opposition candidate should be held accountable for having published online the tallies gathered by the PUD during the election. However, in 2013 PSUV published on its website the actas that their electoral witnesses had collected from that year’s presidential election, with no legal consequences so far. Nor is there any restriction regarding this in the Organic Law of Electoral Processes or the Law of Political Parties of Venezuela. 

The publication of the voting tallies on the website resultadosconvzla.com, now considered public domain, attracted the attention of media, fact-checkers, and data analysts worldwide. In recent days, multiple independent analyses have been conducted and published almost simultaneously, using different methodologies and tools but based on the same data published by the Venezuelan opposition. These analyses have generated an intense international debate on the possibility that González Urrutia may have been the true winner, despite the CNE declaring otherwise.

Cazadores de Fake News had access to a version of the database from resultadosconvzla.com with 24,069 actas on high-resolution, downloaded from the list posted by the PUD team, in a file uploaded on the same website. To date, the website presents even more tallies: 24,532.

The set of documents available online became an essential resource to evaluate Rodriguez’s allegations. This analysis indicates that in at least eight cases, his statements supporting the chavista position on supposed irregularities in the opposition’s records do not hold up under detailed scrutiny. 

1. It is false that PUD spokespeople planned to disregard the CNE results a priori; they were prepared to actively defend the electoral records.

 At the beginning of his broadcasted intervention, Jorge Rodríguez claimed that none of González Urrutia’s spokespeople ever accepted or signed the agreement presented by CNE to candidates, nor did they recognize the authority of the only entity designated to decide who won the July 28 elections. To support this assertion, Rodríguez showed a statement from PUD representative Biagio Pilieri, which was distorted and disseminated by disinformation outlets and through official propaganda channels, days before the July 28th elections.

Pilieri’s statements were taken from a press conference held on July 18th with national and international media. In it, he referred to the PUD’s position of actively defending the votes in favor of Edmundo González, respecting the results reflected in the records available to both, opposition and government.

 At no point in his statement did Pilieri mention the CNE or anything suggesting a claim of fraud.

2. It is not true that the website where the results were uploaded proves that the PUD planned to disregard the results, nor that the founder of Amazon was involved.

Rodríguez referred to the website announced by opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González on July 29th—the day after the presidential elections—where the voting machine records are hosted. The original domain, resultadospresidencialesvenezuela2024.com, was blocked by Venezuelan authorities a few hours after its launch.

 “A day before the elections, on July 27, 2024, that domain was purchased for a year. That means they had already decided not to abide by the CNE’s result,  and set up a parallel CNE pantomime. It was a website purchased in the United Kingdom, the server they have is from Amazon. Jeff Bezos is also involved in the coup plot,” said Rodríguez.

Purchasing the web domain only proves the PUD’s intention to make the records public. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud service provider that allows access to resources like storage and databases without requiring a large investment in equipment and servers. It also handles a DNS and domain registration service that users can configure through a guide provided on their website.

That is, anyone can purchase the service from anywhere in the world, as long as they have a valid credit card, and this does not imply a direct link between Jeff Bezos, its founder, and any page hosted on their servers.

3. It is false that only 30% of the actas appear on the website launched by the opposition.

Rodríguez questioned the position of the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who in a statement released on Thursday, August 1st, claimed that “given the overwhelming evidence,” it was already clear to the U.S. that Edmundo González was the winner of the presidential elections.

 “How is it possible that the Secretary of State of what is considered the world’s greatest power accepts a result when they only published 9,468 records, that’s 30%, that’s what there is on the web, we know because we got in and looked at it,” said Rodríguez.

However, on resultadosconvzla.com, managed by González Urrutia’s team, the last update on August 1st at 11:00 p.m. (Caracas time) reported that 24,532 records had been digitized, out of an approximate total of 30,026 that constitute the Electoral Register for the 2024 presidential elections. The 24,532 records uploaded to resultadosconvzla.com represent approximately 85.03% of the electoral roll and are already in the public domain.

4. It is false that the vote percentages presented by the PUD are the same, simultaneously, in all states.

Rodríguez criticized that, according to the PUD’s summary, González Urrutia won exactly 63% of the votes while Maduro appeared losing simultaneously in the 23 states of the country with a percentage of 30%, which he deemed mathematically impossible.

 “That is, in La Guajira, in Amazonas, in Sucre, in Anzoátegui, in Caracas, exactly the same result. It is, mathematically, impossible,” he stated.

But it is false that the proportion of vote percentages for each candidate is constant, as it varies depending on the state and the number of digitized records.

According to the figures on the website, in Amazonas state González won by a margin of 27,219 votes (59%) compared to 17,374 votes (38%) for Maduro and 1,199 votes (3%) for other candidates. This calculation is based on 54% of digitized records, and a total of 45,795 votes. In other states like Anzoátegui, González won by a margin of 67% (420,075 votes) compared to 31% (194,615 votes) for Maduro. In Sucre, González won by a margin of 50% (219,377 votes) versus 48% (208,962 votes) for Maduro. In Caracas, González won by a margin of 64% (462,138 votes) versus 32% (230,649 votes) for Maduro, and so on with the rest of the states.

5. It is false that the presence of IDs of deceased people on the opposition’s website proves their participation in the election.

Rodríguez and other chavista leaders assured that the IDs of deceased people had appeared on the website resultadosconvzla.com and said this proves that the opposition used dead people to “inflate” the number of votes for González Urrutia.

The IDs of individual voters do not appear in the voting tallies, and this is directly mentioned in the website. When an ID is introduced into the website, it returns the records for the voting station where that person was registered to vote, which does not mean that the person actually voted.

On the other hand, a dead person can still be registered in the electoral registry, as its updates are not immediate, nor infallible. For this reason, the ID number of a dead person can still be linked to a voting station, and be used to consult the results of such a station.

The purge of dead people from the electoral registry depends on several procedures prompt to be affected by human error, such as the need to file a request before the CNE and a certificate of death, among other documents. Purging the electoral registry is a responsibility of the CNE.

While Rodriguez insisted that this process is done frequently, different users in social networks indicated that their dead relatives remain registered to vote, and that other citizens are labeled as dead, even though they are not, proving that these errors are common in the electoral registry.

6. It is not true that the incomplete signatures disqualify voting tallies.

Rodríguez declared that the Venezuelan opposition presented false tallies because they do not have all the data from all the members, polling station witnesses, or machine operators and that in multiple cases, they were also incomplete and illegible. To illustrate this, he showed at least 5 tallies without the machine operator’s signature, without the polling station witness, and 2 in which none of the three signatures appeared. 

“In a tally, the members of the polling station are listed, and they have to sign—and they sign on the voting machine, not on paper. The voting machine turns into a screen, and the polling station members, witnesses, and the machine operator sign, who indeed certifies that an event took place there,” he said. 

However, Article 342, paragraph two, of the Organic Law of Electoral Processes states that the lack of one or more signatures on the tally does not, in any case, affect its validity. 

7. It is false that the “zero record” shown Jorge Rodríguez is counted among the tallies presented by the PUD.

Rodríguez also claimed that, in some cases, those who fed the resultsconvzla.com database uploaded the “zero record” instead of the tally record “because they are very dumb.” 

“When the voting process begins, the first thing after the polling station is set up is the printing of the zero record… which lists all the candidates and all candidates have zero votes. This is a zero record,” he said. 

However, upon analyzing the data provided by the slides from the head of the official campaign command, other inconsistencies were detected. The tally that Rodríguez shows is an initialization record with the code 070908011.03.1.0001, marked 05:07:30 AM in the time field, without any votes counted for any of the candidates, and corresponding to table 3 of the Primary School “Eleazar Beracierto” in the Rafael Urdaneta parish, Carabobo state. But when reviewing the tallies uploaded to resultadosconvzla.com for the same voting center, this particular tally is not even available on the website. 

By checking the published records, Cazadores de Fake News was able to verify that for that voting center, with 4 tables, only the data from one table: number 4, is declared as transmitted; not table 3, which is the one Jorge Rodríguez shows. This could be confirmed by comparing the identifying numbers of the voting center and table, shown by the QR codes, with those appearing in the headers of the evaluated records.

8. It is not true that it is indispensable to have the complete tally to know the identification of the table and how many votes each candidate received.

Rodríguez also questioned the results shown on resultadosconvzla.com, presenting tallies posted on the website that, although they present a QR code, are incomplete, mutilated, or poorly scanned. 

“How did they add this tally if the complete document is mutilated? How do they add it if the results are mutilated? How did they do it? Who explains that to me?” said Rodríguez. 

Although it is true that the voting tallies should be in perfect condition and without amendments, because all the data is loaded into the voting machine itself before printing the record, factors of mishandling and lack of expertise when scanning the ballots to upload them to the web cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, the fact that some records are not in perfect condition or have stains does not invalidate them or make them impossible to count, since the essential technical information and the vote count are encoded in the QR code located at the bottom.

Lawyer and political analyst César Báez, a member of the political analysis platform Politiks, explained that the sequence of numbers obtained after scanning the QR code reveals the identification assigned to the state, the voting center and table, and thereafter, the election results.

Therefore, the code allows obtaining the results for each of the ballots in which the candidate ran, in the same order as on the ballot paper: Nicolás Maduro, Luis Martínez, Javier Bertucci, José Brito, Antonio Ecarri, Claudio Fermín, Daniel Ceballos, Edmundo González, Enrique Márquez, and Benjamin Rausseo.

In the image below, the meaning of the figures obtained after scanning the QR code of a tally is represented. The results for Nicolás Maduro, highlighted in red, correspond to the 13 parties that supported his candidacy, in the same order as they appear on each record. The counts for Edmundo González, represented in blue, are at the end of the code and are always the three figures that precede the numbers before the first exclamation mark, which indicate null and partial votes (highlighted in pink).

The QR code is a way to safeguard the electoral results and a means to verify the data from the scrutiny tally, which is now freely accessible to citizens.After analyzing Jorge Rodríguez’s statements and comparing them with the data from the website resultadosconvzla.com, the lack of information on the voting tallies under the custody of the PSUV and the CNE becomes evident, raising a debate about the transparency of the process. Allowing independent and cross-verification of the available records would clarify any discrepancies and, above all, consolidate confidence in electoral integrity.