The United Nations Group 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 Nicolas Maduro as winner without presenting the results broken down by tables, the international organization published the document that was supposed to be private for the electoral authorities and the Secretary General Antonio Guterres, in which his envoys in the field reiterate that “the National Electoral Council has not published and still has not published results to support its oral announcements.”
The organization's four-member group of experts was in the country a few weeks before the July 28 elections and left a few days later. In the document, they conclude that “fundamental measures of integrity and transparency were not respected,” adding harsh criticisms that the Carter Center has already made.
“The CNE’s results management process did not respect the fundamental measures of transparency and integrity essential to the holding of credible elections. It also did not respect national legal and regulatory provisions, and not all established deadlines were met,” the four-page preliminary report dated August 9 states. “In the panel’s experience,” they add, “the announcement of the result of an election without the publication of its details or the disclosure of the tabulated results to the candidates is unprecedented in contemporary democratic elections. “This had a negative impact on the confidence of a large part of the Venezuelan electorate in the result announced by the CNE.”
The experts repeatedly refer to the CNE's omissions in its responsibilities. They point out in particular that it did not publish the minutes and that these “fundamental paper proofs” are part of the transparency guarantee protocols, which include “several security elements such as QR codes and verification codes with unique signatures, as well as the physical signatures of officials and agents” and that “they seem very difficult to falsify.”
The voting records have become the heart of Venezuela’s post-election conflict. Thanks to a vast network of witnesses and a nimble electoral machine, the opposition managed to collect 83% of the voting records generated by the machines, publish them on a website and make the voter database freely accessible. results in which Edmundo González is declared the winner by a 30-point difference over Maduro. This Saturday, they called for a street demonstration and asked their supporters to bring a printed copy of the minutes of their polling station as an instrument of protest.
Chavismo, for its part, responded with repression, persecution of witnesses and took the case to the Supreme Court, which controls and ordered that the minutes be submitted to all the candidates who participated in the race and to the CNE to resolve the suspicions of fraud through judicial means. The opposition did not deliver them. But the prosecutor's office, also controlled by Maduro, declared that the documents presented by the opposition were false and opened an investigation against the administrators of the website blocked in Venezuela.
The experts say in their report that they examined a small sample of the minutes submitted by the opposition, which “are in the public domain,” and found that they “have all the security features of the original results protocols.” Regarding the electronic transmission of results, on which the government has said it suffered a computer attack without having yet presented evidence, the committee stresses that it worked well at first, “but it stopped abruptly in the hours after the polls closed, without any information or explanation being provided at that time to the candidates or the jury.
They also refer to the pre-election context, “marked by continued 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 candidacy for public office “for several important political figures,” referring to María Corina Machado, who, judicially disqualified, ended up giving up her chosen candidacy in the primaries to Edmundo González. The experts wrote that the Venezuelan authorities cooperated and supported the deployment of the panel and remained in contact until the polls closed on July 28. After that moment, despite their attempts, they were unable to meet with the CNE rectors before they left the country.
Although the report of the United Nations Group of Electoral Experts has not yet been made public, the President of the Parliament, Jorge Rodríguez, He criticised the decision to publish itGuterres' spokesman Farhan Haq announced on Tuesday morning, adding 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 trash without a word. “This panel of experts is a panel of trash,” said Rodríguez. “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 upset before the deputies in ordinary session.
Rodríguez, Maduro's main political operator and his campaign manager, also criticized once again the reports of the Carter Center, which sent a mission to Venezuela to monitor the elections and concluded that they could not be considered democratic due to irregularities related to the presentation of the results. Rodríguez went further in his reproaches and proposed to prohibit international observation. “May no foreigner ever again come to take a position on anything related to the elections in Venezuela. Because of what?” “What capacity do they have?” he asked to the applause of the pro-Chavismo parliamentarians.
In the framework of the Barbados Accords, signed by the government and the opposition last October, it was established that the presidential elections should have as a guarantee the observation of the Carter Center, the UN and the European Union. The latter mission was denied the invitation a few weeks before the elections, when Brussels decided to lift individual sanctions against members of the electoral authority as a gesture in favor of resolving the political crisis in the country that Chavismo has taken badly.
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