By Julie Turkewitz
One of Venezuela’s top election officials, in a declaration sure to jolt the crisis-weary nation, said in an interview that he had no proof that Venezuela’s authoritarian president won last month’s election.
Since the July 28 vote, governments around the world have expressed skepticism, and even outright disbelief, over President Nicolás Maduro’s claim to victory. But the statement by Juan Carlos Delpino — a member of the government body that announced Maduro’s win — represents the first major criticism from inside the electoral system.
Speaking on the record to a reporter for the first time since the vote, Delpino said he “had not received any evidence” that Maduro actually won a majority of the vote.
Neither the electoral body nor Maduro has released tallies to support assertions that the president won reelection, while the opposition has published receipts from thousands of voting machines that show its candidate, Edmundo González, won an overwhelming majority.
In declaring Maduro the winner without evidence, the country’s election body “failed the country,” Delpino said. “I am ashamed, and I ask the Venezuelan people for forgiveness. Because the entire plan that was woven — to hold elections accepted by all — was not achieved.”
Delpino, a lawyer and one of two opposition-aligned members of Venezuela’s electoral council, spoke from hiding, afraid of government backlash. In recent weeks Maduro’s security forces have rounded up anyone who appears to doubt his claim to another six years in power, and many Venezuelans are fearful that his forces are crossing borders to go after enemies.
The National Electoral Council, known in Venezuela as the CNE, is the five-member body charged with deciding the framework of elections, as well as receiving and announcing results. These duties make it enormously powerful.
When the country’s legislature selected Delpino as a member of the council last August, many in Venezuela saw it as an attempt to give it a veneer of balance and legitimacy.
At the time, Delpino was living in the United States, and he returned to Venezuela to serve on the council out of “great levels of commitment” to the democratic process, he said.
Most in the country believed that the council was controlled by Maduro. But Delpino, a longtime member of an opposition party called Democratic Action, said he agreed to join out of a belief that the “electoral route” was the avenue for change.
A spokesperson for the National Electoral Council did not respond to a request for comment.
The July vote pitted Maduro, whose socialist-inspired movement has been in power for 25 years, against González, a previously little-known diplomat who had the backing of a popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado.
Just hours after polls closed on election day, the electoral council president — Elvis Amoroso, a longtime member of Maduro’s party — proclaimed Maduro the winner, with just over half of the vote.
That evening, Delpino decided to stop participating in the council, he said, and he did not appear at a news conference announcing Maduro’s victory.
While Amoroso has yet to produce documentation proving that Maduro won, the opposition gathered the printed tallies of more than 25,000 voting machines on July 28.
Those 25,000 receipts — representing more than 80% of all machines used on election day — showed González had won 67% of the vote. In recent weeks the opposition has posted those receipts on its website.
Delpino declined to say whether he had the voting data received by the government.
But in a message he said he planned to post on the social platform X after his interview with The New York Times, Delpino cited a long list of irregularities that led him to “a loss of confidence in the integrity of the process and in the announced results.”
These irregularities, he wrote, include:
— The National Electoral Council’s refusal to release machine-by-machine results.
— Claims by election witnesses that they were kicked out of polling stations as the stations closed, making it impossible for them to oversee the final moments of the vote.
— An interruption in the electronic transmission of results from voting machines to the council’s data hub. (This could create an opening to tamper with the data.)
— The “worrying lack” of council meetings in the months before the vote, resulting in Amoroso making “unilateral” decisions about the process. This made it difficult for Delpino to push back against policies that tilted the election in Maduro’s favor, like barriers to registration abroad.
On the morning of the vote, Delpino awoke with optimism, he said in the interview, and he was at the electoral council’s headquarters in Caracas by 6 a.m. But by the end of the day, when he realized Amoroso was going to announce an “irreversible” victory for Maduro without proof, he went home, he said, rather than participate in the announcement.
Since the day of the vote, Diosdado Cabello, one of Maduro’s most powerful allies and the vice president of their party, has accused Delpino of being part of a “little group of terrorists” who hacked the electoral system in an attempt to rig a win for González.
(The month before the election, Delpino had criticized Amoroso’s management of the election council to a local news outlet, Efecto Cocuyo, helping to spotlight him as a target for the governing party.)
The United States has recognized González as the winner of the election, and even the governments of Colombia and Brazil — run by left-leaning leaders like Maduro — have expressed “grave doubts” that Maduro won.
All have called on Maduro and the National Electoral Council to release results by polling stations.
Two independent panels that observed the election in Venezuela, one from the United Nations and another from the Carter Center, have said it did not meet the minimum standards for a democratic vote.
If Maduro is inaugurated again in January, it will extend his movement’s time in power into its third decade. Under the president and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, the oil-rich country has experienced an extraordinary economic decline, with mismanagement, corruption and U.S. sanctions eviscerating the economy.
Maduro is under investigation by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity and is wanted by the United States on drug trafficking charges.
Since the vote, some Venezuelans have pressured Delpino to speak out and criticized him for taking weeks to do so. He said he was coming forward now out of a commitment to transparency.
In the years that Chávez and then Maduro consolidated control, some in the opposition have pushed for a military coup or foreign intervention.
But Delpino said that despite all he had seen in recent weeks, he thought elections were the answer to better future. “I believe even today that the answer for Venezuela is democratic,” he said.
“The answer is electoral. With another protagonist in the CNE, of course,” — a reference to Amoroso — “but I believe in that electoral solution.”
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