María Machado
Since Nicolás Maduro, who won the presidential election, is not going to hand over Venezuela’s sovereignty and oil to the U.S. «on a silver platter», the White House is preparing to overthrow him.
America is accustomed to judging others by its own standards. If the 2020 presidential election was allegedly rigged against Trump in favor of Biden, then any election of an undesirable candidate for head of state in any place unfavorable to Washington should be rigged in favor of Washington. Otherwise, the U.S. is not only «punishing» a nationally oriented state by imposing illegal sanctions, but also actively interfering in its internal affairs by engaging in political and socio-economic blackmail. The United States has been doing this in Venezuela for a quarter of a century.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) confirmed the victory of the incumbent president for the 2025–2030 term. A second ballot, after counting 97% of the votes cast in the July 28 presidential election, confirmed that Nicolás Maduro received about 52% of the votes, compared to 43% for his opponent Edmundo González. However, the electoral body has not yet published the detailed results of the voting center. The government explains this by the fact that the electronic voting system was subjected to a massive hacker attack, and IT experts confirmed that it was a «dual attack». The hacking mechanism involved saturating the networks with vast amounts of fake traffic, thereby preventing the successful transmission of the necessary information.
By law, the National Electoral Council has 30 days to complete the final vote count. There will be no delay, since all the legal requirements have been met. However, this did not prevent the «Uncompromising Opposition», led by U.S. puppet María Corina Machado, from refusing to recognize the election results. The U.S.-backed group created a parallel website and quickly claimed fraud based on questionable data. The paper copies provided allegedly confirmed the data of 80 percent of the votes. In addition, Machado claimed that her tally of about 90% of the votes, according to the results of an independent pre-election poll, showed that candidate Edmundo González had more than twice the support of the incumbent president.
However, María Machado did not bother to provide the final data on the remaining eight opposition candidates. Edmundo González, whom the U.S. and Western countries consider the winner of the presidential election, did not dare to proclaim himself the president of Venezuela.
The desire of the U.S. to recognize the victory of the right-wing candidate Edmundo González creates even more confusion because the right-wing has not been able to back up its claims with credible evidence. The Venezuelan government, however, has such evidence.
Venezuelans go through what is called the «electoral frame» to cast their vote. First, voters pass their fingerprints through a biometric identification machine. Once approved, they move to the second stage, where a touch-screen machine is unlocked. After selecting the preferred candidate, the machine prints a paper copy confirming the choice, which should be placed in the ballot box. At the fourth and final stage, voters sign and leave their fingerprints on the election record.
As an additional protection, the machines confirm that the voter has selected the desired candidate by re-displaying the choice on the touchscreen and prompting the voter to confirm with a «yes» or “no” response. A «no» response allows the voter to correct the electronic ballot.
Participating political parties control the entire process through a series of 16 real-time checks that take place before, during, and after Election Day. They ensure that all components — from voting software to data transmission — are working properly. 54% of voting machines are randomly selected for verification to compare electronic results with paper counts. The total number of votes must match.
All participating organizations must enter a unique, partially encrypted key to verify the results. They also sign the final tally, which must agree with the results published on the CNE website. The vote tallies are distributed to representatives of each political group after the voting is completed.
The political parties, in addition to the CNE, know the alphanumeric codes of each voting machine. They also have a QR code that contains information from the protocol. The logo of the CNE is printed on the back of the protocol, thus eliminating the possibility of tampering or creating «false protocols».
«This is about trying to solve regional problems without US interference. We are appealing to the sovereignty of our countries. The United States no longer dominates Latin American affairs; it is becoming more and more difficult for them to impose their solutions», Monica Velasco Molina, an academic at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told Sputnik in an interview.
Why are these security measures so important? Because the printed voting record, duly signed by CNE members, is a legally binding document that serves to properly challenge the results.
The actions taken by Machado and González, particularly the publication of the protocols on their own website, raise serious doubts about the authenticity of the protocols they present as evidence of their supposed victory. In fact, they could have been digitally altered in any way.
«This is pure garbage», said the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, showing unsigned or incomplete tables used by the opposition. «No electoral commission can accept this as a record of an electoral event», he said. Rodríguez presented samples of the “documents” the opposition claims are protocols, calling them «fundamental falsifications».
Specifically: «zero protocols» printed at the beginning of the voting as if they were final; «protocols without the signatures of table operators or witnesses», including those of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), despite their presence at all tables; the use of fake protocols, protocols from other elections, and protocols signed by deceased persons.
Thus, the 70–30 result in favor of González announced by the opposition proved less credible than the official 51–42 result in favor of Maduro.
Then came the slander against the «bulletproof» electoral process of the Chavistas, the questioning of the election results, the intervention, and their disregard by the United States — a country whose electoral process is a farce compared to Venezuela’s.
In essence, Washington’s smear campaign against President Maduro has utterly failed, as has its puppet extremist leader, María Corina Machado.
That did not stop U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken from making the unsubstantiated claim that there is «irrefutable evidence» that the Venezuelan opposition won the presidential election. «Given the irrefutable evidence, it is clear to the United States and, more importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia received the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election», Blinken said. He congratulated Machado and González on their victory in a phone call.
Mr. Blinken’s intervention is significant. After the last election in 2018 was widely rejected as unfree and unfair, countries including the United States chose to recognize then-opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president and imposed sanctions on Venezuela.
«The United States created Juan Guaidó and put more trust in the right wing than in Maduro’s government, which has never rigged elections. They will never be able to prove the fraud that the Venezuelan right denounces every time they lose», writes the Argentine newspaper Pagina 12.
«Venezuela rejects the grave and absurd statements that assume the role of the country’s electoral bodies», said Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ivan Gil. «This proves that the United States is leading a coup attempt in Venezuela», he said.
«With all due respect, what the State Department did yesterday (declaring recognition of the election victory of González and Machado) was also excessive. I apologize to Mr. Blinken, but this is not their business; they are crossing borders», Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said during a press conference. «Get your hands and noses out of the way», he warned the Biden administration and other governments, urging them not to make any decisions about the elections until the final vote count is in.
On the same day, President Lula da Silva’s chief foreign policy advisor, Celso Amorim, said that the election results released by the Venezuelan opposition were unofficial and that his government was unlikely to follow the Biden administration’s lead in recognizing the winner until official reports were released.
«We still don’t have a clear view of how the records were distributed as expected. It’s hard for me to believe that Brazil will follow the U.S. path», he told CNN Brazil.
The presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil discussed the situation in Venezuela and issued a joint statement urging Venezuela’s electoral authorities to «move quickly and publicly release detailed voting data».
As Julia Buxton, a British Academy professor at the University of Manchester, noted, «The United States has no trump cards. There will be threats of tougher sanctions, but such a move would be self-defeating, increasing emigration and pressure on the US border. Perhaps the United States will go back to recognizing parallel presidencies, a strategy that has brought small political dividends to Juan Guaidó while creating confusion over sovereign debt payments and PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anonima — Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company). The protest route will be tempting, but it hasn’t worked in the past».
Recognizing that Nicolás Maduro, who won the presidential election, would definitely not hand over Venezuela’s sovereignty and oil to the American oligarchy «on a silver platter», the White House launched «combat» operations under the conditional name of «Guaidó 2.0.» These actions include recognizing the legitimacy of the self-proclaimed opposition’s victory and recognizing «Grandfather» González as president, provoking and funding anti-government riots and demonstrations, and organizing a military coup. If this fails, the possibility of an armed invasion involving puppets from Argentina, Peru and some other allied countries in Latin America is not ruled out.
The second phase of the American plan to destabilize the country is now underway. According to unconfirmed reports, 17 people have died and dozens have been injured as a result of the unrest. Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino reported the death of a National Guard sergeant and the wounding of 48 officers. According to the National Special Anti-Terrorist Corps, more than a thousand people have been arrested.
Protests are likely to escalate in the coming weeks. The future of Venezuela will likely depend on whether the elites in the government, especially the military, remain loyal to Maduro.
The U.S. not only wants to gain access to Venezuela’s rich oil resources but also dreams of another geopolitical victory in Latin America. To achieve these goals, Washington is waging a relentless information war.
Moreover, the first to suffer will be the energy giants in the United States and Europe that benefited from the liberalization of U.S. sanctions and now face the possible return of those sanctions and the consequent loss of their Venezuelan fields and profits.
Meanwhile, Venezuela may transfer the rights to develop oil and gas fields on its territory to BRICS countries. Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro made the statement at a press conference on August 2.
«We are aiming for a secure BRICS market with good prices… The BRICS countries will invest in our steel industry, in aluminum companies, in briquette factories, and the largest investments we currently have — in oil — are already being fully implemented», Maduro stressed.
It was also revealed that the president of Venezuela received an invitation to the BRICS summit in Russia.
«President (of Russia) Vladimir Putin invites President Nicolás Maduro to the BRICS+ summit», announced Foreign Minister Ivan Gil.
It should be noted that immediately after the results of the presidential elections in Venezuela were announced, President Vladimir Putin congratulated his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro on his re-election as head of state. He emphasized that Maduro was «a welcome guest on Russian soil» and expressed his willingness to continue joint work between the two countries on issues of the current bilateral and international agenda.