Northern Light
Superstar
Right-wing candidate for Ecuadorian President assassinated.
Above is video of same, chaotic, but not graphic.
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- Thread starter AlbertC
- Start date
Right-wing candidate for Ecuadorian President assassinated.
Above is video of same, chaotic, but not graphic.
AlbertC
Superstar
Under pressure from allies, Venezuela's Maduro asks Supreme Court to audit the presidential election
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro said he asked the country's Supreme Court to conduct an audit of the presidential election, after the opposition disputed his claim to have won and amid international calls to release detailed vote counts.
CARACAS, Venezuela - 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.
“The serious doubts that have arisen around the Venezuelan electoral process can lead its people to a deep violent polarization with serious consequences of permanent division,” Petro said Wednesday in a post on social media site X.
“I invite the Venezuelan government to allow the elections to end in peace, allowing a transparent vote count, with the counting of votes, and with the supervision of all the political forces of its country and professional international supervision,” he added.
Petro also proposed that Maduro's government and the opposition reach an agreement “that allows for the maximum respect of the (political) force that has lost the elections.” The agreement, he said, could be submitted to the United Nations Security Council.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude reserves and once boasted Latin America’s most advanced economy, but it entered into free fall after Maduro took the helm in 2013. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000 per cent led to social unrest and mass emigration.
More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014, the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history. Many have settled in Colombia.
The Carter Center, an independent U.S.-based institution that evaluates elections, said late Tuesday it was unable to verify the results of Venezuela’s presidential election, blaming authorities for a “complete lack of transparency” in declaring Maduro the winner without providing any individual polling tallies.
AlbertC
Superstar
Evidence shows Venezuela’s election was stolen – but will Maduro budge?
It is not new for Nicolás Maduro to be accused of attempting to steal a presidential election – the US described his claim to have won re-election in 2018 as an “insult to democracy” – but the evidence for such allegations has never before been quite so overwhelming.
Analyses carried out by the opposition, academics and media organizations have offered strong evidence to suggest that the Venezuelan president lost – by a landslide – to the main opposition candidate, retired diplomat Edmundo González.
Evidence shows Venezuela’s election was stolen – but will Maduro budge?
Analyses indicate Nicolás Maduro lost the presidential election, but country’s leader shows no signs of stepping aside
www.theguardian.com