Pressure kept building against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Wednesday, when his close ally Colombian President Gustavo Petro, joined other foreign leaders in urging him to release detailed vote counts from the recent presidential election after electoral authorities declared him the winner.
Petro’s comments come as the National Electoral Council, which is loyal to the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has yet to release any printed results from polling centers as it did in past elections. A day earlier, another of Maduro’s allies, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, along with U.S. President Joe Biden called for the “immediate release of full, transparent, and detailed voting data at the polling station level.”
The rebukes follow the stunning announcement Monday of Maduro’s main challenger, Edmundo González, and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, that they had secured more than two-thirds of the tally sheets that each electronic voting machine printed after polls closed on Sunday. They said the release of the data on those tallies would prove Maduro lost the election.
Machado said the tallies show González received roughly 6.2 million votes compared with 2.7 million for Maduro. That is widely different from the electoral council’s report that Maduro received 5.1 million votes, against more than 4.4 million for González.
