Maduro lost election, tallies collected by Venezuela’s opposition show

That conclusion, which echoes the results of independent exit polling and similar independent analyses, offers further evidence against the authoritarian socialist’s claim that he defeated challenger Edmundo González in the July 28 vote.

Venezuela’s national electoral council, which is controlled by Maduro, has declared him the winner, with nearly 52 percent of the vote to González’s 43 percent. But a week after the vote, the council has yet to make precinct-level results to support the claim available to be audited, as required by Venezuelan law.

The opposition has published its own results, compiled with the help of thousands of volunteer poll watchers who collected and scanned tally sheets printed out by electronic voting machines on election day at each of the country’s polling centers.

The Post extracted and analyzed data from 23,720 of the tally sheets that were scanned and posted online by the opposition. Of those, González earned 67 percent of the vote to Maduro’s 30 percent.

Those tally sheets represent 79 percent of the voting tables used on July 28. Even if Maduro won every vote on the remaining 21 percent, assuming a similar turnout, he would still fall more than 1.5 million votes shy of González.

The Post analyzed only those sheets that included valid, scannable QR codes that could yield data. That represented about 97 percent of the sheets published by the opposition.

To corroborate the authenticity of tally sheets posted online, a Washington Post reporter reviewed hundreds of physical tally sheets, which are being stored by the opposition in cardboard boxes in secret locations across the country to evade a government crackdown.

The strips of paper, receipts known here as “actas,” show the day’s results from each voting table at every polling station. Each acta contains a unique code, the date and time it was printed, an electoral council watermark and the signatures of poll workers and watchers who were present.

While The Post was not able to obtain independent confirmation that the physical tally sheets held by the opposition are authentic, details on them indicate they were produced at the polling stations.

The data printed on them matched the data encrypted in their QR codes. Each was signed by multiple people, some of whom The Post interviewed. The sheets and their scans showed blue lines matching those of the paper used by electoral council machines. The precincts identified on the sheets are all real.

The Post then compared the results of dozens of physical tally sheets to those on the scanned versions provided by the opposition and found that all of them matched. Many polling centers went for Maduro — but not enough to give him more votes than González.

“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,” said Dalson Figueiredo, a political science professor at Brazil’s Federal University of Pernambuco who participated in that study. “This is scientifically proven evidence, and we cannot have ideology overriding that.”

Exit polling conducted by Somerville, N.J.-based Edison Research on election day indicated that González captured 65 percent of the vote to Maduro’s 31 percent. The Atlanta-based Carter Center, which was invited by the government to observe the election, concluded last week that it “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.”

Several governments have expressed skepticism of the electoral council’s results. The Biden administration last week rejected Maduro’s claim of victory.

“Given the overwhelming evidence,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Thursday, “it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes” in the election.

The Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for an interview.

Maduro has claimed a cyberattack has prevented the government from releasing precinct-level results. He has not provided evidence of the attack. Election experts who observed the system on July 28 and an auditor consulted by The Post said the system did not suffer a disruption that would have affected the transmission of results.

Twelve days before the vote, the technician in charge of security for the electoral council said a hack would be unlikely because the network would be “completely isolated.”

“We will have no communication with the rest of the world,” Carlos Hernández said, according to a report published by the government. The state-owned telecommunications company would be “assigned solely for this purpose on the day of the event,” he said, and the system was guarded by other protections, including limits on access and alerts.

National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, a close Maduro ally, has accused the opposition of uploading flawed or falsified documents. He has shown several examples of actas that lacked signatures. Opposition organizers say the missing signatures can be explained by the challenges many poll watchers faced accessing voting centers and by ordinary human error of the kind that happens in any large-scale election.

Even some government sympathizers have raised doubts about Maduro’s claims. Two who were interviewed by The Post, among hundreds of foreign socialists and left-wing activists invited by the government to watch the vote, said they saw no major disruptions on election day. Neither would call the vote democratic. One acknowledged that Maduro might not have won.

“My belief is that both sides lie,” said the observer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. “Edmundo González did not win by 30 points, and we might never know if Maduro won.”

Maduro has asked Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice, another institution he controls, to take up the case. He has said he is “prepared to turn in all of the tally sheets from 100 percent of the tables to the court when it requires it.” He has not said whether they will be made public.

The slips of paper are now at the center of Venezuela’s mounting political crisis, giving the opposition what it says is proof of its victory and helping put international pressure on Maduro to negotiate an exit.

The opposition continues to collect outstanding tally sheets, even as Maduro’s security forces and paramilitary supporters escalate harassment and detentions of perceived opponents.

The trove is the result of a massive, sophisticated operation organized over months and executed by thousands of ordinary Venezuelans who watched the polls for irregularities on election day and refused to leave their voting centers without the receipts. Many continue to risk their safety by covertly safeguarding the records.

“We knew who we were up against,” said Jesús Armas, who oversaw the collection of vote tally sheets in Libertador, a municipality outside Caracas that has long been a stronghold of government support.

“It’s not the first time Maduro has committed fraud,” he said. “but it’s the first time we can prove it.”

How they did it

Maduro, who has ruled Venezuela for more than a decade, reached a deal with the opposition last year to conduct a free and fair presidential election in 2024.

Opposition leaders believed he would try to steal the vote. The autocrat, who has presided over a historic economic collapse and the exodus of more than 7 million people from the country, was accused by the opposition of fraud to win the 2013 election to replace Hugo Chávez, the founder of the socialist state, and more widely to win reelection in 2018.

The opposition came up with a system to protect the vote: a network of thousands of volunteers, trained and accredited by the government, to watch the polls and collect the actas.

A group of opposition leaders, some holed up inside the Argentine Embassy in Caracas for months to evade arrest warrants, recruited and coordinated “captains” across the country. They set up 133 locations, with high-definition scanners and Starlink internet access, where volunteers gathered, digitized and uploaded the documents to an app created for the purpose.

One such location, code-named “Indigo Points,” was a private apartment in a working-class area in Caracas. The local opposition organizer is a 32-year-old mechanical engineer who asked to be identified only by his middle name because he has received threats.

Leandro and a group of friends stayed up through the night on July 28 and worked through the next day retrieving tally sheets. They used code words such as “receipts” to avoid the attention of the government and its supporters.

After scanning and uploading them, they placed the records in envelopes in a cardboard box, and stationed a statue of the Archangel Michael defeating Satan just above it.

In many voting centers, authorities blocked poll watchers from observing the end-of-the-day count or refused to turn over the tally sheets. In response, hundreds of opposition supporters mobilized, surrounding some voting centers well into the morning and refusing to leave until the tally sheets were in the hands of the poll watchers.

The moment Leandro realized González had won was when a volunteer handed him an acta from a precinct with a history of strong support for the government, a center called “Mission Base Dreams and Thoughts of Chávez.”

“Did we seriously win here?” he asked. “I don’t believe it.”

Some neighborhoods have proved especially challenging. Pro-government motorcycle gangs have taken control of 23 de Enero, the Caracas neighborhood where Chávez is buried; the opposition has received only 60 percent of the tally sheets there.

Elsewhere, the opposition has received help accessing tally sheets from pro-Maduro poll watchers. Juan Barreto, a former Chávez ally turned Maduro critic, said a poll watcher representing Maduro’s party at his voting table agreed to send the acta to an opposition friend who was barred from entering the center.

It was the poll watchers, one opposition coordinator said, “who saved this election.”

Claims of a cyberattack

Maduro has long been accused of manipulating elections. But never before has he been accused of such a brazen fraud. Several foreign leaders, including some of his leftist allies in Latin America, have pushed him to publish the results on which he’s basing his claim of victory.

But a week after the vote, the national electoral website remains down. Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab has accused the opposition of working with hackers in North Macedonia to breach the election system.

The claim has baffled leaders in the Balkan nation. Stefan Andonovski, North Macedonia’s digital transformation minister, said Venezuela has not provided any evidence of the alleged hack or requested an investigation.

The Moscow-based security company Kaspersky did not detect evidence of a distributed denial of service attack, a server-flooding assault that prevents users from accessing services and sites, against Venezuela between July 25 and 28.

Mario Torre, an electronic engineer who is auditing the electoral system for the opposition, said there was a brief pause in voting center data transmission, but the system on the night of July 28 showed no evidence of a disruption that would have affected the government’s ability to release precinct-level results, as Venezuelan law requires.

The protected channel, he said, is “practically impossible to hack.”

Jennie Lincoln, head of the Carter Center’s mission in Venezuela, told The Post that the fact that votes were transmitted over dedicated telephone lines and satellite phones “calls an internet hacking disruption excuse into question.”

Naledi Lester, an election analyst who has observed elections for the European Union and other organizations for 25 years, said tally sheets of the kind used in Venezuela are a standard system of cross-checking critical for transparency. They allow all parties to verify results.

Venezuela’s election law guarantees all parties the right to these tally sheets, she said, so there’s no reason to doubt the validity of the documents.

“Rather than question the authenticity of what the opposition has published,” she said, “the question is why haven’t the authorities, whose duty it is to publish the actas, done it to prove their point?”

Rich and Paúl reported from Washington. Scott Clement in Washington and Marina Dias in Brasília contributed to this report