Nicolas Maduro asks Supreme Court to audit Venezuela’s presidential election

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro said he asked the country’s Supreme Court to audit the presidential election, after the opposition disputed his claim to have won and amid international calls to release detailed vote counts.

Mr Maduro told reporters that the ruling party is also ready to show the totality of the electoral tally sheets.

“I throw myself before justice,” he said to reporters outside the Supreme Court’s headquarters in Caracas, adding that he is “willing to be summoned, questioned, investigated”.

It is Mr Maduro’s first concession to demands for more transparency about the election. However, the Supreme Court is closely aligned with his government. Federal officials propose the court’s justices and they are ratified by the National Assembly, which is dominated by Maduro sympathisers.

The Carter Centre criticised the audit request, saying the court would not provide an independent review.

“You have another government institution which is appointed by the government to verify the government numbers for the election results which are in question,” said Jennie Lincoln, a senior adviser for Latin America and the Caribbean and the leader of the delegation that the Carter Centre sent to monitor the election in Venezuela. “This is not an independent assessment.”

The Atlanta-based group said on Tuesday night that it was unable to verify the results of the election, and it blamed authorities for a “complete lack of transparency” in declaring Mr Maduro the winner. Venezuela’s electoral authorities allowed the group to send 17 experts to observe the election.

Mr Maduro insists that he won the election, despite his main challenger, Edmundo Gonzalez, and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, saying that they secured more than two-thirds of the tally sheets that each electronic voting machine printed after polls closed on Sunday.

The opposition figures said the release of the data on those tallies would prove Mr Maduro lost the election.

Pressure has been building against Mr Maduro.

The National Electoral Council, which is loyal to the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has yet to release any printed results from polling centres as it did in past elections.

His close ally, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, on Wednesday joined other foreign leaders in urging him to release detailed vote counts.

A day earlier, another of Mr Maduro’s allies, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, along with US President Joe Biden called for the “immediate release of full, transparent, and detailed voting data at the polling station level”.

Ms Machado said the vote tallies the opposition has obtained show Mr Gonzalez received roughly 6.2 million votes compared with 2.7 million for Mr Maduro.

That is widely different from the electoral council’s report that Maduro received 5.1 million votes, against more than 4.4 million for Mr Gonzalez.

“The serious doubts that have arisen around the Venezuelan electoral process can lead its people to a deep violent polarization with serious consequences of permanent division,” Mr Petro said in a post on social media site X.

“I invite the Venezuelan government to allow the elections to end in peace, allowing a transparent vote count, with the counting of votes, and with the supervision of all the political forces of its country and professional international supervision,” he added.

Mr Petro proposed that Mr Maduro’s government and the opposition reach an agreement “that allows for the maximum respect of the (political) force that has lost the elections”.

The agreement, he said, could be submitted to the United Nations Security Council.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it entered into free fall after Mr Maduro took the helm in 2013.

Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000% led to social unrest and mass emigration.

More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014, the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history.

Many have settled in Colombia.

Within hours of the electoral council announcing that Mr Maduro had won, thousands of protesters took to the streets of the capital, Caracas, and other cities.

The protests, which continued into Tuesday, turned violent at times, and law enforcement responded with tear gas and gun pellets.

Attorney General Tarek William Saab told reporters that more than 700 protesters were arrested in nationwide demonstrations and that one officer was killed.

The Venezuela-based human rights organisation Foro Penal also reported that 11 people, including two minors, had been killed in unrest related to the election.