The United States has called on Venezuela to release data from its July 28 election.
The Biden administration called for Venezuela’s National Electoral Council to publish a tabulation of the votes from the precincts.
The National Electoral Council declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner with 51 percent of the vote; it stated that the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, received 44 percent.
“If there is resistance to providing that additional information, then I think that becomes highly problematic when it comes to the ability of the United States or other members of the international community to judge whether these elections were in fact inclusive and credible,” a Biden administration official told reporters on July 29.
“Our deepest concern at this juncture is that the analysis and data that we have about this election—which is independent from the National Electoral Council results—is at odds with the results as they were announced by the Venezuelan authorities.
“And so that discrepancy, in our view, needs to be investigated and addressed before we can close the books on this election.”
Administration officials, including White House national security adviser John Kirby, said on July 29 that it is admirable that Venezuelans went to the polls amid the totalitarian environment in the South American country.
At the same time, they said, the United States is concerned about the results of the election as they do “not reflect the will and the votes of the Venezuelan people,” Mr. Kirby said.
“We have never been moved by hatred. On the contrary, we have always been victims of the powerful,” Mr. Maduro, who has led Venezuela since March 2013, said on national television.
“An attempt is being made to impose a coup d’état in Venezuela again of a fascist and counterrevolutionary nature.”
Opposition leader María Machado dismissed the council’s announcement.
The opposition claimed that Mr. Urrutia won 70 percent of the vote, “the largest margin of victory” in Venezuelan history, Ms. Machado said.
“Despite all the problems which we’re discussing now, the fact that Venezuela did in fact hold an election yesterday, which allowed an opposition candidate to be on the ballot and for [the] voting process to unfold, only came about as a result of the calibrations that we’ve done with our sanctions policy over the last year,” an administration official told reporters.
“Now that we are faced with potentially a new scenario, we are going to take that into account as we map forward where we may had with respect to sanctions toward Venezuela.”
The administration had issued licenses allowing oil companies, including Chevron, to operate in the oil-rich nation.A senior administration official told reporters that the United States will continue to evaluate its sanctions policy toward Caracas “in light of overall U.S. national foreign policy interests, the actions and non-actions that are taken by Maduro and his representatives, and the overall direction of travel as it relates to our broader U.S. bilateral engagement with Venezuela.”
According to an official, independent poll watchers were barred from entering Venezuela despite that Mr. Maduro initially agreed to admit them.
The election was held on what would have been former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s 70th birthday. Chavez preceded Mr. Maduro, running the nation as a totalitarian leader for more than 14 years.
The Venezuelan economy shrunk by 71 percent between 2012 and 2020 but is projected to grow by 4 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
