Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was embroiled in a major scandal on Wednesday after the company that provided the technology for the election of its Constituent Assembly stated that the result was manipulated.
The revelation comes a few hours before Maduro swore to the 545 elected assembly members on Sunday in a Constituent Assembly that they will begin their duties on Thursday.
It is a worldwide earthquake,”
said Julio Borges, head of the opposition majority parliament, who asked the prosecution to investigate the fraud.
The National Electoral Council (CNE), accused of being a pro-government institution, said that more than eight million people participated in the elections, but the opposition claims that only about 3.5 million did so, thus denouncing “the biggest fraud in the history of the country.”
We estimate that the difference between the number announced and the number that the system shows is at least one million voters,”
said Antonio Múgica, president of Smartmatic, which supported the Venezuelan elections between 2004 and 2015, including when Maduro won in 2013 by narrow margin on the opponent Henrique Capriles.
The scandal erupted amid the rejection of the opposition and the international community to the Constituent Assembly, a suprapoder that will rule the country indefinitely and reform the 1999 Constitution, led by President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013.