Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro lost his country's recent presidential election after his opponent's party likely received more than twice as many votes as the incumbent's, according to a Washington Post analysis of election results collected by the opposition party.
The Post examined over 23,000 precinct-level tally sheets collected by the Democratic Unity Roundtable, whose candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, has been recognized by the United States as the winner of the election. The newspaper notes that this sample represents almost 80% of voting machines in Venezuela and that the conclusion "echoes" independent exit polling.
Maduro, who heads the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, claimed victory after Venezuela's national electoral council, which he controls, declared him the winner with almost 52% of the vote. But the council has not yet released precinct-level results so they can be audited, which is required by law in the country.
The opposition's results show that Maduro won 3,131,103 votes in total, less than half the 6,901,845 received by González Urrutia. All other candidates received 251,820 votes in total.
The Post noted that even if Maduro were to win every vote not included in these results, about 21% of the votes cast, he would still fall about 1.5 million votes shy of beating González Urrutia.
"After analyzing our own data, seeing the opposition's results and how they both match up, my conclusion is that we're witnessing the largest electoral fraud in the history of Latin America," Dalson Figueiredo, a professor of political science at Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil who helped to analyze the election results for AltaVista Research, told the Post. "This is scientifically proven evidence, and we cannot have ideology overriding that."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.