FILE - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, right, stands with Colombian President Gustavo Petro after Petro arrived at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, Nov. 18, 2023. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) – Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro said he asked the country’s Supreme Court to conduct an audit of the presidential election after opposition leaders disputed his claim of victory, drawing swift condemnation by independent observers.
Maduro told reporters Wednesday that the ruling party is also ready to show the totality of the vote tally sheets from Sunday’s election.
“I throw myself before justice,” he said to reporters outside the Supreme Court’s headquarters in Caracas, adding that he is “willing to be summoned, questioned, investigated.”
This is Maduro’s first concession to demands for more transparency about the election. However, the Supreme Court is closely aligned with his government; federal officials propose the court’s justices and they are ratified by the National Assembly, which is dominated by Maduro sympathizers.
The Carter Center criticized Maduro’s audit request, saying the court wouldn’t provide an independent review.
“You have another government institution which is appointed by the government to verify the government numbers for the election results which are in question,” said Jennie K. Lincoln, a senior advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean and the leader of the delegation that the Carter Center sent to monitor the election in Venezuela. “This is not an independent assessment.”
The Atlanta-based group said Tuesday night that it was unable to verify the results of the election, and it blamed authorities for a “complete lack of transparency” in declaring Maduro the winner. Venezuela’s electoral authorities allowed the group to send 17 experts to observe the election.
Maduro’s main challenger, Edmundo González, and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, say they obtained more than two-thirds of the tally sheets that each electronic voting machine printed after polls closed. They said the release of the data on those tallies would prove Maduro lost the election.
Maduro insisted to reporters that there had been a plot against his government and that the electoral system was hacked, but he didn’t give any specifics or present any evidence. He is expected to address national and foreign media Wednesday afternoon, his first official news conference since the election.
Pressure has been building against the president since the election. The National Electoral Council, which is loyal to his United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has yet to release any printed results from polling centers as it did in past elections.
Maduro’s close ally, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, on Wednesday joined other foreign leaders in urging him to release detailed vote counts. A day earlier, another of Maduro’s allies, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, along with U.S. President Joe Biden called for the “immediate release of full, transparent, and detailed voting data at the polling station level.”
Brazil’s presidential office refused to comment Wednesday on whether a Supreme Court audit would amount to an independent verification of election results, instead pointing to a statement from the Ministry for Foreign Relations published Monday. That statement said the Brazilian government awaits “the publication by the National Electoral Council of data broken down by polling station, an indispensable step for the transparency, credibility and legitimacy of the election result.”
Lula said of Maduro on Tuesday that “the more transparency there is, the greater his chance of having peace to govern Venezuela.”
Machado said the vote tallies the opposition has obtained show González received roughly 6.2 million votes compared with 2.7 million for Maduro. That is widely different from the electoral council’s report that Maduro received 5.1 million votes, against more than 4.4 million for González.
“The serious doubts that have arisen around the Venezuelan electoral process can lead its people to a deep violent polarization with serious consequences of permanent division,” Petro said Wednesday in a post on social media site X.
“I invite the Venezuelan government to allow the elections to end in peace, allowing a transparent vote count, with the counting of votes, and with the supervision of all the political forces of its country and professional international supervision,” he added.
Petro proposed that Maduro’s government and the opposition reach an agreement “that allows for the maximum respect of the (political) force that has lost the elections.” The agreement, he said, could be submitted to the United Nations Security Council.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it entered into free fall after Maduro took the helm in 2013. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000% led to social unrest and mass emigration.
More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014, the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history. Many have settled in Colombia.
Speaking to reporters in Vietnam on Wednesday, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief said the bloc won’t recognize Maduro’s claim of electoral victory without independent verification of voting records.
“They should have been provided immediately, as in any democratic electoral process,” Josep Borrell said.
Within hours of the electoral council announcing Monday that Maduro had won, thousands of protesters took to the streets of the capital, Caracas, and other cities. The protests, which continued into Tuesday, turned violent at times, and law enforcement responded with tear gas and gun pellets.
Attorney General Tarek William Saab on Tuesday told reporters that more than 700 protesters were arrested in nationwide demonstrations Monday and that one officer was killed.
The Venezuela-based human rights organization Foro Penal said 11 people, including two minors, had been killed in election-related unrest.
The Organization of American States was set to convene Wednesday to discuss Venezuela’s election.
Maduro’s closest ruling party allies quickly came to his defense. National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez – his chief negotiator in dialogues with the U.S. and the opposition – insisted Maduro was the indisputable winner and called his opponents violent fascists. He called for Machado and González to be arrested.
In a Spanish-language post on X, the EU’s Borrell urged Venezuelan authorities to “end detentions, repression and violent rhetoric against members of the opposition.”
Meanwhile, Machado and González urged their supporters to remain calm.
“I ask Venezuelans to continue in peace, demanding that the result be respected and the tally sheets be published,” González said on X. “This victory, which belongs to all of us, will unite us and reconcile us as a nation.”
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Associated Press writer Ella Joyner in Brussels and Eleonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro contributed.
