Four days after Venezuela’s July 28 election, suspicions of electoral fraud are growing. The ruling party-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE) declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner on Sunday, giving him 51.2% of the vote, compared to 44.2% for his rival, opposition candidate Edmundo González. It did so by providing a bulletin it described as “irreversible,” bypassing the transparency and integrity procedures required, and without providing any data to facilitate verification of its claims. At the same time, the opposition is claiming a comfortable victory, 67% to 30%, based on more than 24,000 minutes of which it claims to have a copy and which it has presented on a website, which has joined others that spread similar data.
Given this discrepancy, what can we conclude? My judgment is clear right now: the data provided by the opponents is more in-depth and more verifiable.
The Maduro government’s data is poor
On Sunday night, the CNE announced the election results with a bulletin containing just six figures: three voting figures – for Maduro, Edmundo González and “others” – and three corresponding percentages. These were the percentages of a count that they said was at 80% and that meant an “irreversible” trend. But since then there has been no further update. Four days have passed, and although it is shocking and violates established procedures, the Government has not offered any further data on the election results.
The CNE has not published the minutes of the vote count or its results. They are the essential document generated by the electronic voting machines at the closing of a table, with the votes and other details. The minutes are printed in the same voting center, given to those present and parties, and sent electronically to the CNE, which is in charge of calculating the totals. The same organization was supposed to publish the results broken down, by center and table, from the minutes, but in the middle of the night on Sunday its website stopped working. It has not returned.
The Government has also not provided the verification records, which certify, as we explained here, that the planned Citizen Verification Audit (the comparison of the scrutiny records with the counting of the paper ballot boxes) was successfully carried out.
No subnational results have been offered either. The CNE has not published the vote by municipality or by region. Only a handful of total figures from the first night.
As if that were not enough, the six-figure results offered by the CNE are also suspicious. The reason? The voting figures for “Maduro,” “Edmundo,” and “Others” coincide with an exact percentage of votes up to the sixth decimal. It would be extremely rare for such a result to happen by chance: it is difficult for it to happen with one candidate, once in a thousand times, but for it to happen with two candidates is a fluke in a million.
The explanation for this accuracy? The easiest thing to do is to think that the number of votes offered by the CNE bulletin is a figure calculated from percentages: they started from the total votes (10,058,774), took a round percentage, like Maduro’s 51.2%, and with that they calculated his votes: 5,150,092.288. Since it is absurd to give decimals to votes, they left it at 5,150,092. That is why the percentages would be almost round, but not completely, only to the sixth decimal. It is not impossible to believe that those percentages are the correct ones, and that the CNE calculated the votes from them instead of using the votes actually counted, but it is a strange behavior to say the least.
The data of the opponents is much deeper
After spending the morning gathering information, the opposition held a press conference on Monday afternoon to reveal that they had obtained 73% of the votes, with results that contradicted those announced by the CNE and that gave them the victory. Since then, the opposition has continued to collect votes and has presented them on various websites. The most recent one claims to contain 24,576 votes, as of Thursday, which is 81.8% of the total. Anyone can search for a vote, consult detailed results and even download a scanned copy.
Each record includes a lot of information: all the results of the table, a QR code version of them, their identifier, the date and time of closing, a chain hash security measures, and the name and signature of the members of the table, the witnesses and even the operator of the device. The minutes are an essential element to clarify the election result, because they are potentially verifiable. For example, their information can be compared with other paper trails of the day, such as the minutes of the Verification Audit.
Unlike the CNE, the website that the opposition has published with the minutes allows for obtaining – and subjecting to analysis – the results in each parish, municipality and Venezuelan state.
I myself have been able to access the tabulated data of 997 of these voting tables. I have used the subset that has been processed by an independent civil society group, which prefers not to be named for fear of repression, and validated by a group of academics from the Federal University of Pernambuco and the University of Michigan. Before the elections, they chose 1,500 representative voting tables in the country, with pre-registration. These days they have obtained voting tables from 997 of those 1,500, and from there, applying a formal and documented methodology, they have produced an estimate of the final result: 66% for Edmundo González and 31% for Maduro.
A thorough audit of these data takes time, but my first impression is positive – in the past I have handled data from dozens of elections in many countries. For example, in a first graph I show the votes for Maduro and Edmundo for each table. I have calculated their percentages and marked those tables with an exact percentage, which are few, as expected.
In this second graph, I have taken voting data from more than 200 Venezuelan parishes and cross-referenced it with a socioeconomic indicator provided by the Venezuelan National Institute of Statistics. It is just an example, but a plausible pattern appears: according to the data from the voting records, Maduro would have had more votes in the most disadvantaged regions.
The summary is simple: the Maduro government has barely provided any data to support its declaration of victory, while the Venezuelan opposition has set up an operation to collect and present thousands of records. It offers more information, is more transparent, exposes itself to evaluation and scrutiny, and in this way, increases the credibility of its results.
The only alternative for Chavismo is to undertake a very rapid exercise in transparency. Or perhaps it is already too late? Suspicions of irregularities are reinforced with each day of official opacity.
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