As thousands of people demonstrated across Venezuela, opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez announced Monday that his campaign has evidence that he won the country’s disputed election in which electoral authorities certified President Nicolas Maduro as the winner.
Gonzalez and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado told reporters they had more than 70 percent of the tallies from Sunday’s election, showing that Gonzalez received more than double the votes of Maduro.
They called on people who have been protesting for hours since Maduro was declared the winner to remain calm and to gather peacefully at 11 a.m. on Tuesday to celebrate the election results.
“I speak the truth calmly,” Gonzalez said as dozens of cheering supporters outside his campaign headquarters in the capital, Caracas.
“We have in our hands the tables that prove our definitive and mathematically irreversible victory.”
Their announcement came after the National Electoral Commission, loyal to Maduro’s ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, formally declared him the winner and awarded him a third six-year term.
Protests in the capital were largely peaceful but turned into scuffles after dozens of National Police officers in riot gear blocked protests.
Police used tear gas to disperse the protesters, some of whom hurled stones and other objects at police stationed on the main street of the upscale neighborhood.
As protesters moved through the city’s financial district, a man opened fire. No one was injured in the shooting.
The protests come after one of Venezuela’s most peaceful elections in recent history, reflecting hopes that Venezuela can avoid bloodshed and end 25 years of one-party rule.
The winner will control an economy recovering from collapse and a population hungry for change.
“We have never been motivated by hatred. On the contrary, we have always been victims of those in power,” Maduro said at a nationally televised ceremony. “There is once again an attempt to stage a fascist and counter-revolutionary coup in Venezuela.”
“We already know the film. This time there will be no weaknesses,” he added, saying Venezuela’s “laws will be respected.”
Machado told reporters that the tally showed Maduro and Gonzalez received more than 2.7 million votes and about 6.2 million votes, respectively.
“A free people is a respected people, and we will fight for freedom,” Gonzalez said. “Dear friends, I understand your indignation, but our response as democratic forces will be calm and firm.”
Venezuelans vote using electronic voting machines that record the vote and give each voter a paper ballot showing their candidate of choice, which they are supposed to place in a ballot box before leaving the polling station.
After the polls close, each voting machine prints out a tally showing the names of the candidates and the number of votes they received.
But the ruling party maintains tight control over the voting system through a loyal five-member electoral council and a network of long-time local party coordinators who have near-unlimited access to voting centers.
These coordinators, some of whom were in charge of distributing government benefits, including subsidized food, prevented opposition representatives from entering polling stations, as permitted by law, to witness the voting process, the vote count, and, most importantly, to obtain copies of the final mechanical tally.
As of Monday evening, election officials had not yet released tallies for each of the 30,000 voting machines.
The electoral commission’s website was down and it remained unclear when the results would be made public. The failure to release the results prompted election observers and independent European Union groups to publicly call on the electoral commission to release the results.
In the capital’s poor Petare district, people walked to chant their opposition to Maduro, with masked young people ripping down his election posters that had been hung from streetlights, as heavily armed security forces waited just a few blocks away.
“He has to go, whatever the circumstances,” said Maria Arraez, a 27-year-old hairdresser who took part in the protest.
As the crowd marched through different neighborhoods, retirees and office workers cheered them on by banging pots and pans or recording their protests in a show of support, some yelling “freedom” and hurling expletives at Maduro.
Several foreign governments, including the United States and the EU, have withheld recognition of the election results.
The opposition, having failed to oust President Maduro in three demonstrations since 2014, has put its faith in the ballot box.
The country boasts the world’s largest oil reserves and was once Latin America’s most advanced economy, but has suffered a steep decline since Maduro came to power, including plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages of basic goods and 130,000 percent hyperinflation.
U.S. oil sanctions were aimed at removing Maduro from power after his 2018 reelection, which dozens of countries denounced as illegitimate, but they only accelerated the exodus of some 7.7 million Venezuelans from the crisis-ridden country.
Voters lined up to cast their ballots as early as Saturday evening, raising opposition hopes that they can undermine President Maduro’s power base.
The election results from the Board of Elections came as a shock to many who had been celebrating online and outside some polling stations in what they believed to be a landslide victory for Gonzalez.
Chile’s leftist leader Gabriel Boric called the results “hard to believe,” while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US had “serious concerns” that the announced tally did not reflect the actual number of votes or the will of the people.
Responding to criticism from other governments, Maduro’s Foreign Ministry announced it was recalling diplomats from seven countries in the Americas, including Panama, Argentina and Chile.
Foreign Minister Ivan Gil called on those governments to do the same for their officials in Venezuela.
He did not explain what would happen to Machado’s staff, including his campaign manager, who have been hiding out in the Argentine Embassy in Caracas for months since authorities issued arrest warrants.
Mr. Gonzalez was the opposition’s most unlikely figure: The 74-year-old was a little-known figure until he was appointed at the last minute in April to represent Mr. Machado, a leading opposition figure who had been blocked from running for any public office for 15 years by the Maduro-controlled Supreme Court.
Authorities set Sunday’s election to coincide with the 70th birthday of former President Hugo Chavez, the revered leftist firebrand who died of cancer in 2013, leaving the Bolivarian Revolution in Maduro’s hands.
But Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which controls all branches of government, are more unpopular than ever among many voters who blame oppressive low-wage policies that have fueled hunger, crippled the oil industry and led to the separation of families due to migration.
The president’s selling point in this election has been economic stability, which he has tried to sell with talk of entrepreneurship, stable currency exchange and low inflation.
The International Monetary Fund projects the economy, which shrank 71% between 2012 and 2020, to grow 4% this year, the fastest in Latin America.
But most Venezuelans have not seen an improvement in their quality of life, with many earning less than $200 a month and families struggling to afford basic necessities.
Some of them are working second or third jobs. A grocery basket to feed a family of four for a month costs an estimated $385.
The opposition has managed to consolidate its support for one candidate after years of internal divisions and election boycotts that thwarted its ambitions of toppling the ruling party.
Machado, a former lawmaker, won a landslide victory in opposition primary elections in October with more than 90% of the vote.
After being blocked from taking part in the presidential election, she appointed a university professor to run in her place, but the National Election Commission banned her from registering as well.
That’s when Gonzales, a political newcomer, was selected.
Messrs. Gonzalez and Machado focused their campaigns on Venezuela’s vast interior, which has never seen the economic activity seen in Caracas in recent years.
They promised a government that would create enough jobs to allow Venezuelans living abroad to return home and reunite with their families.
