The United Nations Panel of Experts has surprised with the publication of the preliminary report on its visit to Venezuela. In the midst of the crisis generated by the proclamation of Nicolás Maduro as the winner without presenting the results broken down by polling stations, the international organization released the document that was supposed to be private for the electoral authorities and Secretary General Antonio Guterres, in which its envoys on the ground reiterate that “the National Electoral Council did not publish, and has not yet published, any results to support its oral announcements.”
The group of four experts from the organization was in the country a few weeks before the elections of July 28 and left days later. In the document they conclude that “basic measures of integrity and transparency” were not met, adding to the severe criticisms already made by the Carter Center.
“The CNE’s results management process failed to comply with basic transparency and integrity measures that are essential for the conduct of credible elections. It also failed to follow national legal and regulatory provisions, and all established deadlines were missed,” the four-page preliminary report dated August 9 states. “In the panel’s experience,” they add, “the announcement of an election result without the publication of its details or the disclosure of tabulated results to the candidates is unprecedented in contemporary democratic elections. This had a negative impact on confidence in the result announced by the CNE among a large part of the Venezuelan electorate.”
Experts repeatedly point to the CNE’s failure to fulfill its responsibilities. In particular, they point out that it has not published the minutes and that these, “fundamental paper evidence,” are part of the protocols to safeguard transparency, which have “several security elements such as QR codes and verification codes with unique signatures, as well as physical signatures of officials and agents” and that “they appear to be very difficult to falsify.”
The voting records have become the core of the post-election conflict in Venezuela. With an extensive network of witnesses and an agile electoral machine, the opposition managed to collect 83% of the voting records generated by the machines during the vote, published them on a website and made the database of the results freely accessible, in which they declared Edmundo González the winner by a difference of 30 points over Maduro. For this Saturday they have called for a demonstration in the street and have asked their followers to bring a printed copy of the voting record from their voting table as an instrument of protest.
Chavismo, for its part, has responded with repression, persecution of witnesses and has taken the matter to the Supreme Court, which it controls and which has ordered the minutes of all the candidates who participated in the contest to be handed over and to the CNE to settle the suspicions of fraud through judicial means. The opposition has not handed them over. But the Attorney General’s Office, which is also controlled by Maduro, has said that the documents presented by the opposition are false and has opened an investigation against the administrators of the website, which is blocked in Venezuela.
The experts say in their report that they reviewed a small sample of the minutes submitted by the opposition, which “are in the public domain,” and found that they “exhibit all the security features of the original results protocols.” Regarding the electronic transmission of results, which the government has claimed was hacked without having yet presented evidence, the panel notes that it worked well initially, “but was abruptly stopped in the hours after the polling stations closed, without any information or explanation being provided to the candidates at that time, or to the panel.”
They also mention the pre-election context, “marked by continuous restrictions on civic and political space.” In their report, they highlight that “the government campaign dominated state media, with very limited access for opposition candidates,” as well as restrictions on running for public office “for several prominent political figures,” referring to María Corina Machado, who, judicially disqualified, ended up giving up her candidacy chosen in the primaries to Edmundo González. The experts wrote that the Venezuelan authorities cooperated and supported the deployment of the panel and that they maintained contact with them until the polls closed on July 28. After that moment, despite their attempts, they were unable to meet with the CNE rectors before their departure from the country.
Even though the report of the United Nations Panel of Electoral Experts had not yet been made public, the President of Parliament, Jorge Rodríguez, criticized the decision to publish it, announced this Tuesday morning by Guterres’ spokesman, Farhan Haq, who added that the preliminary document had been shared with the CNE board and would be made public, as would the final report.
“They signed, they have no word, they are garbage without a word. This panel of experts is a panel of garbage,” said Rodriguez. “Because they signed saying that the report is private and that only the Electoral Power of Venezuela and the Secretary General of the United Nations would know it,” he said, very annoyed, before the deputies in an ordinary session.
Rodríguez, Maduro’s top political operator and campaign manager, also again criticized the Carter Center’s reports, which sent a mission to Venezuela to monitor the election and concluded that it could not be considered democratic due to irregularities related to the presentation of the results. Rodríguez went further in his criticisms and proposed prohibiting international observation. “Let no foreigner ever again come to take a position on anything that has to do with the elections in Venezuela. On what account? What kind of capacity do they have?” he said amid applause from parliamentarians close to Chavez.
As part of the Barbados accords, signed by the government and the opposition last October, it was established that the presidential elections should be monitored by the Carter Center, the UN and the European Union as guarantees. The latter mission was denied an invitation a few weeks before the election, when Brussels decided to lift individual sanctions against members of the electoral authority as a gesture in favor of solving the country’s political crisis, which Chavismo took badly.
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