US and Latin American countries reject Venezuelan election claim by supreme court

The United States and ten Latin American countries have issued a joint statement rejecting the Venezuelan supreme court’s certification of the results of the country’s disputed presidential election.
The regime-loyalist court declared President Maduro the winner and also said the opposition would be investigated for publishing results that showed that its candidate won by a landslide.
The governments of Argentina, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, the United States, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic and Uruguay said the court’s ruling was invalidated by a “lack of independence and impartiality”.
The statement came after the president of the court, Caryslia Beatriz Rodríguez, a former member of the ruling Socialist party, announced on Thursday that “we validate the results where Nicolás Maduro Moros was elected”.
The court said it had examined “electoral materials” submitted by various candidates and concluded that the result declared on July 29 was valid.
The court had been asked to investigate the count by Maduro himself after opposition claims of fraud and widespread protests against the declared result, in which 23 people died. However, the ruling is unlikely to dispel doubts about the veracity of the result.
“Not even the most brilliant writers of Latin American magical realism would have thought of writing the story of a country whose highest court would affirm the re-election of a president based on records that no one has ever seen,” Francisco Rodríguez, the Venezuelan analyst and professor of public and international affairs at the University of Denver, said on X.
The opposition says the official results announced on July 29, whereby Maduro won with 52 per cent of the votes, are pure invention. Its own count of final tallies from more than 25,000 election machines gave its candidate, Edmundo González, 67 per cent of the vote and Maduro 30 per cent.
Tarek William Saab, the Venezuelan attorney general, said on Friday that he would issue a formal summons to [Edmundo] González to meet state prosecutors in connection with the opposition’s publication of detailed election results on a website. “He will have to attend,” said Saab.
While the opposition has published copies of its voting receipts online, the government has not done so, claiming a “cyberattack” had made doing so impossible.
On Friday, the US State Department said that the court’s ratification of the official result “lacks all credibility” amid “overwhelming evidence” that González received the most votes.
“The publicly available and independently verified precinct-level tally sheets show Venezuelan voters chose Edmundo González as their future leader,” said Vedant Patel, the principal deputy spokesman at the State Department.
Two independent election monitoring groups, one from the US-based Carter Center, the other from the United Nations, both of whom had teams on the ground for the vote, gave scathing verdicts on the process. The UN’s panel of election experts said on August 13 that “the announcement of an election outcome without the publication of its details or the release of tabulated results to candidates has no precedent in contemporary democratic elections”.
The Carter Center declared the vote did not meet “international standards of electoral integrity at any of its stages”.
Before the supreme court made its widely expected ruling, senior opposition figures gave their own verdicts.
“Gentlemen of the supreme court: no ruling will replace popular sovereignty,” said González, 74, a former ambassador. “The country and the world know of your bias and, therefore, your inability to resolve the conflict. Your decision will only aggravate the crisis.”
The wildly popular opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who was banned from being a candidate in the election but threw her support behind González, addressed a post on X towards the supreme court. “Bring it on,” she said.
Both leaders are in hiding after being labelled “fascists” and threatened with imprisonment by Maduro.
González did not respond to a summons by the supreme court to present himself and his evidence in person. The court has said he was in contempt of court and will face unspecified sanctions.
Maduro’s purported re-election to a six-year term, which would begin on January 10, has been backed by Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and several other mostly non-democratic states.
Dozens of nations, including the UK, the US and even the the left-wing regional powers Brazil and Colombia, have called on the government to reveal its evidence behind the declared result.
President López Obrador of Mexico said that his government would wait for Maduro’s to publish voting tallies from the election before recognising a winner.
President Boric of Chile, another left-winger, was highly critical of the supreme court’s decision. “There is no doubt that we are facing a dictatorship that falsifies elections and represses those who think differently,” he said.
Maduro’s 11-year rule has coincided with the economic collapse of Venezuela, which has spurred a migration crisis. Nearly eight million people, one quarter of the entire population, have left the country in recent years.