After two conflicting versions of “official” electoral results were made public in Venezuela, rallies in support of both the government and the opposition ensued, as well as street protests. Will anything change once complete and verified electoral results are published?

Venezuela’s elections have worked unexpected wonders, once again. This time, an outcome worth underscoring is that they are reviving the utopia of an international society truly bound by principles of respect for national sovereignty and democratic values.

Political leaders from countries across the world are repeating it like a mantra: their position on Venezuela is rooted in their respect for the Venezuelan people’s will, as expressed in the 28 July elections (J-28). Surely there is something perplexing here, since the governments represented by these leaders are in practice adopting starkly different positions?

Some governments recognised the victory of Nicolás Maduro immediately after the National Electoral Council (NEC) publicised official results late on voting day; some others swiftly recognised Edmundo González (main candidate of the opposition), negating NEC results but claiming to be guided by an alternative source of electoral data made available online by González’s supporters. A third group is awaiting a full, detailed publication of official results before proceeding to formally recognise the outcome.

Despite those markedly differentiated positions, a common message transpires: Venezuelans have expressed their will at the ballot box, and this will should be respected. That will has been stamped on the official voting tallies from the election, so these tallies, seemingly, contain the key to resolving the current political dispute in Venezuela. But do they?

In the Venezuelan electoral system, these tallies are extremely secured from potential manipulation. Once balloting is over, they are encoded and digitally transmitted to the NEC’s central tally centre directly from the voting machines. They are also printed out at each voting station and signed off by the accredited witnesses of the electoral contenders, who can officially report on incidences. The digital and printed copies have unique identifying codes and their contents are identical; that concordance in results can be and is audited through procedures that contenders in elections know in advance.

In previous elections, the NEC has published detailed results (based on these tallies) not long after publicising the general electoral results. This year, the publication of detailed results has not yet occurred. The NEC alleges that cyberattacks are responsible for this delay—the NEC website, as well as other government agencies’ websites, remain down.

Dismissing the authority of the NEC, a clearly well-prepared team of González’s supporters hasted to upload digitalised copies of thousands of allegedly official tallies that witnesses of González’s supporting parties would have collected in polling stations on voting day. These tallies would show him winning with 70 percent of the vote—in marked contrast with the results published by the NEC, which granted Maduro 51 percent against the 43 percent that González would have obtained.

For those who support González within Venezuela, and those outside the country who recognised him as winner of the election, those were the tallies in which the democratic will of Venezuelans had been expressed.

After the two conflicting versions of “official” electoral results were made public, rallies in support of both Maduro and the opposition ensued, as well as street protests. Some of these protests revealed a coordinated and violent character that targeted public buildings and government agencies. In addition, more than 20 deaths and some 2000-plus arrests have accompanied these protests.

Amid these open disputes and the different responses from the international community, Maduro requested that the Supreme Court of Justice intervene by reviewing the electoral results. The Electoral Branch of this Court proceeded with the summoning of all presidential candidates for interviews. This was followed by the collection of official documentation and electoral data. The NEC and the political parties that participated in the elections were asked to produce evidence of electoral records and the voting tallies collected by their witnesses. The NEC was also asked to provide evidence of the alleged cyberattacks.

The president of the NEC and nine out of the ten presidential candidates who participated in the elections attended the hearings. The NEC and several of the parties that participated in the election supporting candidates provided the requested electoral documentation, while other parties that supported González, like Un Nuevo Tiempo, used their presence in Court to demand that the complete electoral results be published by the NEC. Edmundo González was the only candidate who did not answer the call from the Court, adducing risk of detention.

On 22 August, the Supreme Court concluded its review and ratified President Nicolás Maduro’s victory. The NEC has not yet publicised the detailed results of the election, but it is expected to do so in the coming weeks.

Will anything change once complete and verified electoral results are published? The reasons for optimism are limited, given precedents.

What Maduro’s government would do if it were to face the reality of an electoral defeat is unclear. While it is evident that they don’t trust that a government formally headed by González would guarantee their personal safety, Chavista forces (including previous Maduro’s governments) have in the past recognised electoral defeat—most recently, in the regional elections of 2021 in which opposition candidates won more than a hundred municipal governments.

As for González, precedents provided us with an idea of what has happened following the Court’s ruling. Maria Corina Machado, the radical opposition leader to whom González submissively accompanies in public events, has refused to accept electoral results in the past—except when elections brought her to occupy a seat at the National Assembly. Indeed, she has gone so far in her systematic misrecognition of existing Venezuelan institutionality that no one believes that she would ever accept the authority of the NEC, the Supreme Court, or any other public power in the country. If an official audit were to show González as winner of the elections, surely she would have used it (rather than accepted it) as evidence of the alleged truth contained in the tallies that her and González’s website published.

But if a review of electoral results turned out to ratify the validity of the verdict that the NEC publicised on 28-J, we are likely to see a repetition of a well-known script: denunciation of fraud, a spotlight on sympathetic media, and a carrousel of negotiations with international leaders who, perhaps, may help González/Machado gain an honorary title of shadow presidents of the Venezuelan Republic, at least for a period.

However, at present this honorary title looks less achievable than it did a few years ago when Juan Guaidó, the former opposition leader, obtained it. This time, the US and others in the European Union won’t be so predisposed to embark on another adventure with an unknown destination.

Dr Luis Angosto-Ferrández is a senior lecturer in the departments of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Venezuela Reframed (Zed, 2015), editor of Democracy, Revolution and Geopolitics in Latin America (Routledge, 2013), and contributor to Latin American Extractivism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), as well as the author of many other scholarly pieces on Venezuelan politics and society.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.