The Carter Center stated on Tuesday night that it cannot verify the results of the controversial elections in Venezuela, where the authorities declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner and pointed out the "total lack of transparency" of the electoral body.
Invited by the National Electoral Council (CNE) to observe the elections, the Carter Center deployed 17 experts and observers in Venezuela starting on June 29, with teams based in four cities: Caracas, Valencia, Maracaibo, and Barinas.
Meanwhile, the EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, during his visit to Vietnam, stated that the bloc could not recognize the results of the Venezuelan elections until all votes are counted and the records are shared. Shortly before, the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS) urged Nicolás Maduro to acknowledge his defeat in the presidential elections in Venezuela or call for a new, more transparent vote.
The office of Luis Almagro joins numerous international criticisms of the election results that declared the incumbent president the winner and have been rejected by several countries. U.S. President Joe Biden and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, urged the Maduro government to immediately disclose "complete, detailed, and transparent electoral results."
The President of the National Assembly of Venezuela, Jorge Rodríguez, stated that presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia and opposition leader María Corina Machado "should be arrested," accusing them of being responsible for post-election protests.
Machado rejected the offer. At least 12 people have died and numerous arrests have been made in protests in various regions of the country against the election results provided by the electoral body, with 80% of the vote count completed and without showing the tally sheets, while more than two million votes were yet to be counted, and it is still unknown to whom they were attributed.