08.02.17: The Fraud

The company that provides and operates the electronic voting machines used in the Sunday Constituent Assembly election issued a stunning statement today claiming that the election’s results had been altered by the Maduro regime. Thew news came from the CEO of SmartMatic, Antonio Mugica, during a press conference in London in which Mugica said:

It is with the deepest regret that we have to report that the turnout numbers on Sunday 30th July for the Constituent Assembly in Venezuela were tampered with.

Mugica also explained that SmartMatic knows exactly how many votes were cast in the election because the machines are designed to tally that figure, and that the total number of votes cast and the number provided by the Maduro regime differed by at least one million votes. Mugica would not give further detail as to the actual number of votes cast in the election pending the result of a full audit.

On Sunday, the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE) announced that slightly over 8 million people had voted in the election, despite the fact that voting centres were largely empty for most of the day on Sunday. Opposition and independent observers claim that the actual number of votes was actually between 2.5 and 3.5 million.

The company’s announcement today is the latest and most overwhelming piece of evidence that suggests that the Constituent Assembly vote on Sunday was fraudulent. Just yesterday, one of the heads of the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), rector Emilio Rondon, said that the institution had “bent” and “eliminated” so many of its own internal anti-fraud checks that it was impossibly for him to say with certainty that the election had not been rigged.

This morning, 20 technical managers with the company left Venezuela just before the company held its press conference “for security [reasons]”.

SmartMatic Confident “Without Any Doubt” Results Were Rigged

SmartMatic, which has provided electronic voting machines for Venezuelan elections since 2004, also posted a lengthy statement on its website explaining in detail how it knows that the Maduro regime committed fraud during Sunday’s vote. The statement claims that the company’s voting machines are laden with anti-fraud mechanisms that are “impossible to circumvent”, and that provide obvious and immediate signs of fraud to the machine operators.

Part of the statement reads:

Based on the robustness of our system, we know, without any doubt, that the turn out of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was manipulated. It is important to highlight that similar manipulations are made in manual elections in many countries, but because of the lack of electronic security and auditing safeguards, they go unnoticed.

The statement goes on to explain that the voting machines “make it event when results are manipulated”, and that normally election observers would be present to receive the alerts. However, because only regime-affiliated observers participated in Sunday’s vote, the machine’s voter-fraud alarms were apparently simply ignored.

SmartMatic also said that at the end of the day, the voting machines compile a final tally of all the votes cast across all of the machines on election day. However, this final tally “can be ignored by the authorities in charge of running the election, [and] altered results can be announced in its place”, which is what occurred in Venezuela on Sunday.

The full text of the SmartMatic statement regarding Sunday’s fraudulent electoral results can be found here.

Maduro: “Stupid” SmartMatic CEO “Pressured By US” Into Lying

Maduro reacted this evening to SmartMatic claims by calling the company’s CEO, Antonio Mugica, “stupid”, and by suggesting that he had been pressured by the United States into saying that Sunday’s vote had been rigged.

Speaking in a televised address, Maduro said:

They can’t agree. Julio Borges said that 600,000 people voted. Reuters says 3.5 million voted, and the stupid [CEO of] SmartMatic was pressured by the U.S. and says that it was 7.5 million votes.

Mugica in fact said that the regime’s voter number and the voter number tallied by the company’s machines were off “by at least” one million votes, suggesting the possibility that the actual different may be greater than a million.

Despite the fact that SmartMatic has presented overwhelming evidence that the electoral process was opaque, Maduro simply stated that it was in fact “transparent” and said that anyone who said otherwise was an “international enemy” of Venezuela.

Maduro also said that he would “take measures” against SmartMatic and “the countries that are against Venezuela”, but he did not specify exactly what he meant by the comment.

For her part, the head of the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), Tibisay Lucena, held a press conference earlier in the day in which she called SmartMatic “irresponsible” for making its comments. Tellingly, Lucena did not attempt to provide any evidence to disprove the company’s claims, choosing instead to simply repeat that SmartMatic was wrong.

She said:

SmartMatic’s announcements are an unprecedented opinion from a company that only provides a service… SmartMatic is in charge of technical services, and that’s it.

Opposition Reacts to SmartMatic Revelation

The National Assembly held a session today in which it reacted to the SmartMatic revelations regarding Sunday’s vote by doubling-down on its insistence that the Constituent Assembly cannot be allowed to meet given its fraudulent nature.

During today’s session, legislators approved a request for the Public Ministry to investigate the allegations of fraud that surround Sunday’s vote, and announced that they would request that SmartMatic provide it with the hard data that it has on Sunday’s results.

Deputy Tomas Guanipa spoke on what the SmartMatic revelations mean for Venezuela, saying:

We we saw on Sunday was the biggest joke played on our people in all of history. This Constituent [Assembly] was stillborn…

This is a clear demonstration that what we witnessed on July 30 was the largest fraud, the largest electoral crime in history. Tibisay Lucena [the head of the CNE] committed a crime…

National Assembly vice president Freddy Guevara used his time at the podium to say the following:

we will not allow this fraudulent Constituent [Assembly] to be convened.

National Assembly president Julio Borges said:

That which people from all walks have been screaming about has been completely confirmed. Sunday’s result are fraudulent and fictitious. SmartMatic has said that it has hard evidence that confirms that the result given was fake.

Deputy Juan Guaido spoke through Twitter on the fact that for years the CNE has boasted that the country’s electoral system was safe and fraud-proof, saying:

Years of electoral propaganda are now in the garbage. The so-called safest and most trustworthy electoral system in teh world was manipulated…

The Mesa de la Unidad Democratica (MUD) also announced a march towards the National Assembly tomorrow in rejection of Sunday’s fraudulent election. The march is scheduled to leave from five points across Caracas tomorrow at noon.

Maduro Pushes Installation of Constituent Assembly Back One Day

Maduro announced today that the Constituent Assembly would meet for the first time on Friday, pushing the original date for the body’s installation back one day.

Maduro suggested that the reason for the date change was to allow for more time to take care of administrative matters. He said:

We have proposed that the National Constituent Assembly be installed on Friday at 11:00 AM instead of tomorrow so that it can be organized in peace, calm and [following] all of the necessary protocols.

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