Venezuelan Election Council Calls UN Voter Report “Packed With Lies”

The CNE electoral council for Venezuela, which came under fire on Wednesday for announcing that President Nicolas Maduro had won an election that was universally rejected, called a UN report contesting the results “rife with lies.”

In a poll conducted on July 28, the CNE declared Maduro the winner with 52% of the total votes cast; however, they did not offer a comprehensive analysis.

The opposition, the US, the EU, and a number of Latin American nations have all denounced Maduro’s win.

In Venezuela, anti-Maduro demonstrations have resulted in 25 fatalities so far, along with numerous injuries and over 2,400 apprehensions.

A group of UN election specialists ruled that the CNE “fell short of the basic transparency and integrity measures” in a preliminary report released on Tuesday.

Following what it called a “impeccable and transparent electoral process,” the CNE retaliated on Wednesday, calling the UN report “rife with lies and contradictions” and claiming that a “cyber-terrorist attack” has stopped it from releasing a full breakdown of polling station-level results.

Since election day, the CNE website has not been accessible.

The UN report has likewise been dismissed by Venezuela’s foreign ministry.

Enrique Marquez, a former leader of the opposition who also served on the CNE and ran against Maduro in the past, announced on Wednesday that he will ask the prosecutor’s office to look into his former colleagues on the electoral council for possible criminal charges.

Mexico maintained that it could handle Venezuela’s post-election turmoil on its own.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters, “This is a matter that belongs to Venezuelans, and what we want is for there to be a peaceful solution to disputes, which has always been our foreign policy.”

Declaring that he would wait for a decision from Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal, which Maduro had requested to validate the election results, he stated he had no immediate intentions to get in touch with his fellow leftist leaders in Brazil and Colombia to talk about the situation.

“Coup d’etat”

The opposition claims that its own tallying of results at the polling station level revealed that retired diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, 74, had won with a sizable lead.

After being disqualified from running by Maduro-friendly state institutions, Gonzalez Urrutia and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado went into hiding after the president charged them of attempting to instigate a “coup d’etat” and “civil war.”

Gonzalez Urrutia stated on Wednesday that the UN panel’s assessment and a previous one from the Carter Center, based in the United States, “prove the lack of transparency in the proclaimed results and corroborate the truth of” the opposition’s released ballots, “which reflect our unequivocal victory.”

The national assembly of the South American nation began debating a set of measures aimed at strengthening restrictions on non-governmental groups, which the dictatorship has referred to as a “facade for the financing of terrorist actions,” one day earlier.

Other measures aim to penalize “fascism,” a term frequently used by Maduro in reference to the opposition and other critics, and to strengthen government monitoring over social media, which is accused of encouraging “hate.”

The single-chamber assembly’s debate is scheduled to go back up on Thursday.

Since taking office in 2013, Maduro has presided over an economic disaster that has resulted in the exodus of over seven million Venezuelans and an 80% decline in the country’s GDP in ten years.

Numerous nations also denounced Maduro’s 2018 election as a fraud.