Maduro's Secret Minutes – DW – 08/20/2024

The Supreme Court’s recognition of Nicolás Maduro’s electoral victory will surprise no one, not even the opposition, which attributes to that court the same degree of impartiality as it does to the National Electoral Council, which had already declared Nicolás Maduro the winner weeks ago.

“These elections took place in the absence of the rule of law,” Leandro Querido, founder of Transparency Electoral, told DW. “Without the rule of law or the division of powers, everything is under the control of the executive, and this has been demonstrated by the work of the National Electoral Council, which is shameful.” The specialist has been following electoral processes in Latin America for 15 years and claims to remember “no more egregious structural electoral fraud in the contemporary history” of the region.

“The same control that the government exercises over the National Electoral Council is exercised over the Supreme Court. What is even more serious is the lack of internal institutions to respond to this situation,” says Alfredo Rojas Calderón, PhD in Communication and Political Science, and researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Rojas has just spent several days in Venezuela, where he went to vote. He sees the government's strategy as transferring responsibility from the National Electoral Council to the Supreme Court of Justice, hoping that the case will be settled by its ruling: “It's the last resort, so the matter will remain open, once the Supreme Court has considered justice, it will have the character of a final judgment, so there will be nothing that can be done.

This is how Rojas explains Maduro's intention. He points out a curious aspect: “Whoever considers himself the winner of the elections and has been declared by the National Electoral Council, is the one who files a complaint with the Supreme Court of Justice… This is additional information” of evidence that the results announced by the National Electoral Commission are not credible.

Minutes are there

What is concrete is that the electoral records have not been made public despite the insistence of the international community. “They have the minutes that the opposition has. Let's remember that the machine, when it checks each table, issues a paper endorsement. And the minutes that the opposition has – 83 percent – are also kept by the electoral authority, we don't know why they never show them,” confirms the founder of Electoral Transparency, Leandro Querido.

He practically rules out the possibility of publishing altered documents. “I think this is impossible, because there are original minutes in the possession of the opposition, which they showed to the world through a platform. The manipulation would be very obvious,” he added, also referring to security guarantees.

Rojas also highlights this point. “I have spoken with some people who are experts in the system, and they say that they would have problems if they wanted to forge or issue new minutes. Because they would have to develop the whole process again. Forging the minutes with the security codes they have, including the signatures of the members and witnesses on the schedules, it is impossible within the system for them to be able to do anything. Find printers who do it in the most accurate way possible, I don’t know of it,” reflects the Venezuelan political scientist.

Thesis “Hacking”.

The government spoke of a computer attack, an argument that was also used to petition the Supreme Court. “I came to believe that this could lead to a proposal for a rerun of the elections,” says Rojas. “But it didn’t happen. There were the election results.” By giving these results, by mere logic, a thesis the pirate It loses meaning. “If your candidate wins, as you say, and the National Electoral Council has declared it so, the piratethis means that the pirate “That's not the problem,” he says.

Leandro Querido speaks of “nonsense”. He raises the question of what can be published now. He adds, “This is not subject to any verification and, above all, not subject to verification by independent organizations… No one today supports the actions of the electoral authority and this judicial body”. For this reason, he considers that “continuing to ask the electoral authority to support the result it gave then, today, with documents, is inappropriate”.

On the other hand, Alfredo Rojas believes that it is still reasonable for the international community to demand the publication of the minutes “as long as this request has been conveyed to the administration”. He proposes providing a group of experts to present it to the Venezuelan government to conduct an audit and verify the results. And that this should be accompanied by dialogue: “Here the only democratic, institutional and political solution is negotiation. This is what must be imposed, and this is what internal and international pressure must lead to.”

Leandro Querido agrees that the solution to the crisis in Venezuela “will now come more than anything else from the political level, from negotiations, because the electoral issue is already over.”

(sand)