Caracas Chronicles

The following text was originally published in Spanish by Cazadores de Fake News as part of the initiative La Hora de Venezuela, and you can read it here

• Some of the results announced outside polling stations on July 28th, captured in videos, match exactly those published on resultadosconvzla.com 
• Users also shared photos of tally sheets from polling stations where Maduro was declared the winner, and the numbers match those recorded on the website. 
• Some videos show figures that don’t exactly match those on the site, but the minor discrepancies are often due to human error.
• These multiple matches cast doubt on the government’s accusation that sheets published by the opposition on the website are fabricated. 

Since the midnight of July 28th, when the National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Nicolás Maduro the winner of the presidential elections with 51.2% of the vote, the voting records have become the cornerstone of the political discussion. The Venezuelan opposition, represented by the Unitary Platform (PUD), contradicted this result by publishing the vote count on a website presenting detailed data from over 80% of the polling stations, backed by tally sheets collected and scanned by opposition witnesses, which show that the candidate Edmundo González Urrutia received more than 7.3 million votes, 67% of the total.

The media and public reaction to the open publication of the results and tally sheets on resultadosconvzla.com prompted a response from the government, which began creating a narrative to discredit and criminalize the website’s content. Through a series of accusations, the initial demand—asking  the CNE or the ruling party (PSUV) to publish their tally sheets for independent verification—has been delayed.

The wide gap between the website’s data and the unverifiable results from the CNE raised doubts among regional leaders, electoral observers, academics, journalists, and data analysts worldwide. In addition to condemning the lack of transparency in the electoral process, the weakness of the government’s arguments against the results published by the opposition has also been made evident.

“Not even with extraordinary levels of organization, conspiracy talent, and financial muscle could a fraud have been perpetrated that produced the data published by the campaign, without leaving traces in the paper trail—traces that, as of the closing of this article, have not appeared,” concludes a report signed by Dorothy Kronick, an assistant professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Legitimacy is being debated between results without clear support from the electoral authority and the scrutiny exercised by the Venezuelan people, making it essential to test the veracity of results published by the opposition online.

I know what happened last July 28th

“Maduro didn’t win. He lost in polling stations where the government had never lost, like in my case. I know this because I was there when the results from my polling station were announced (…),” said one of the many social media users who were present during the final count at their respective polling stations.

The presence of citizens documenting the entire process from their polling stations ensured a steady flow of content through instant messaging, social media posts, images, and videos, creating a digital footprint that—along with the tally sheets posted on the website—reveals an attempt by the government to conceal reality through disinformation and propaganda. In some cases, even making some eyewitnesses doubt what they experienced firsthand.

“A few days ago, I almost slapped myself. I thought, “did that really happen?” Was I part of a lie? For a moment, I doubted. It lasted just a few seconds, but then I told myself: “wait, you were there, that did happen,” recounted an eyewitness, reflecting on how propaganda and disinformation can shake people’s perception of reality. She then added, “Yes, it’s possible for someone to be convinced that what they experienced is a lie.”

Since the night of July 28th, social media has become a repository for hundreds of testimonies from people who felt, firsthand, what occurred at each of their polling stations. Not only have written testimonies, tweets, and conversations about the experiences of the witnesses on July 28th been circulated, but dozens of photos of tally sheets, taken as people left polling stations, have also been published, supporting the authenticity—at least in part—of the results shown on the website set up by the Venezuelan opposition.

In addition, numerous videos have been shared showing the results as polling stations closed, recorded by voters who captured the moment when the announcements were made. In some of these videos, those who announced the results mentioned both the name and location of the polling station, as well as the total votes obtained by the two main candidates in this electoral situation: Nicolás Maduro and Edmundo González Urrutia, or their parties. In other cases, witnesses added up the votes from each station live in front of those present, who had waited outside their polling station for hours to safeguard the vote and document the moment the results were presented on video.

Are the citizen numbers real?

Cazadores de Fake News compared 50 videos shared on social media, tracking the data announced aloud, including results, names, and locations of various polling stations, and compared them with those published on resultadosconvzla.com. Additionally, keyword searches were conducted among 25,073 scanned tally sheets—extracted from the website—using a freely accessible collection of tally sheets created in PinPoint, an AI-based tool from the Google Journalist Studio.

In the specific group of videos analyzed, the PUD candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, appears as the winner in every result announced, surpassing PSUV’s candidate, the incumbent Nicolás Maduro.

Out of the 50 analyzed videos, 18 exactly match both the results announced by the witnesses and the data published on resultadosconvzla.com. These 18 audiovisual pieces—6 of them recorded in Barinas, the homestate of Hugo Chávez, and considered by PSUV as “the cradle of the  Bolivarian revolution”—report the results of 40 polling stations from different electoral centers and states.

In 9 of the 50 videos analyzed, the counts are publicly announced in the presence of military officials from Plan República, or even directly by them. Plan República is a military operation carried out in every electoral process in Venezuela, aimed at maintaining order and security during each election.

Most of the videos were recorded outside polling stations and during the night, which in some cases made it difficult to read the results that were sometimes calculated live by those present, directly reading the printed tally sheets.

For example, in a video recorded outside the Monagas Kindergarten in Maturín, Monagas state, the person reading the tally sheet lists the number of votes obtained by Nicolás Maduro, party by party. Although the video shows that the tally sheet is identical to the one available on the website, the person reading the numbers makes a mistake in one figure, and someone incorrectly adds up the totals, getting 120 votes instead of the 190 recorded on the website. A similar issue occurs in 9 other videos where the counts, to varying degrees, do not exactly match the numbers on resultadosconvzla.com.

The tally read at a polling station in Marutin matches the corresponding result, posted in resultadosconvzla.com, even though the total results announced in the video are different. In most cases, discrepancies can be explained by simple human error, since many of the recordings were produced informally, and before a crowd waiting for the results to be announced.

In other videos, it wasn’t even possible to hear the number of votes for Edmundo González due to the uproar from the crowd that occurs before the witnesses finish announcing the result in favor of the opposition candidate. In 23 other videos—where the results are also favorable to the opposition candidate—the corresponding tally sheet could not be found because the polling station was not specified.

The Tally Sheets on X (Twitter)

The phenomenon of citizen verification and open data also extended to X (formerly Twitter), where photographs and videos of tally sheets shared by users on election night were recovered, providing another opportunity to verify the information on tally sheets uploaded to the PUD’s website.

On July 30th, journalist Eugenio Martínez, who specializes in electoral issues, made a post on his X account encouraging citizen observers from across the country to create a collaborative thread to compare photos of the tally sheets from their polling stations with those published online. Hundreds of Venezuelans participated, vouching for the accuracy of the results or sharing the tally sheets from their respective stations, hosted on the site, although only 35 of them followed Martínez’s initial request.

Cazadores de Fake News verified each one of the tweets that included images of printed tally sheets along with photographs or verification videos. Of the 35 posts with results, only three showed a majority in favor of Nicolás Maduro.

For example, three tally sheets from U.E. Distrital Preescolar La Libertad  -a public school located in the 23 de Enero parish in the Libertador municipality of Caracas- were published in one of the evaluated tweets. The tally sheets posted on X for this polling station match exactly those uploaded to resultadosconvzla.com: 703 votes for Nicolás Maduro and 692 for Edmundo González. Both candidates received approximately 48% of the votes at an educational center located in a traditionally pro-Chávez area.

In contrast, Edmundo González Urrutia won in the remaining 32 posts. For instance, a sample post from polling station number 2 at UE Mesa de Julia, another school in the Tucani parish of the Caracciolo Parra municipality, in Merida state, shows 407 votes for González Urrutia, against 98 for Maduro. A similar vote difference is observed in the rest of the publications.

“Polling stations 1 and 2, from my voting center match exactly the information posted on the website. Same results” assured the X user who posted the pictures.

Despite the government’s efforts to discredit the tally sheets published by the opposition, the videos and photos from July 28th, captured amidst the citizens’ euphoria, largely align with the results shared online. These visual proofs reinforce the experiences of those who claim to have witnessed those results, contradicting the government’s accusations that the tally sheets and results published online are fabricated.

In a context like Venezuela’s, where the government tries to impose its narrative through propaganda and disinformation, the demand for transparency remains strong, while a significant portion of the voting population continues to question the official version of events.