CARACAS, Venezuela _ In a stunning admission that fueled opponents of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the company that runs the South American country's voting technology said the results of widely condemned election Sunday had been manipulated.
The chief executive of Smartmatic, a company founded by Venezuelans specifically to supply voting software for the administration of the late President Hugo Chavez, acknowledged Sunday's results had been inflated by at least 1 million votes.
"It is with the deepest regret that we have to report that the turnout numbers on Sunday, July 30, for the constituent assembly in Venezuela were tampered with," Antonio Mugica said in a London news conference.
Due to the lack of audits and other electoral controls, Mugica said his firm couldn't stand by the government's results, which claimed nearly 8.1 million ballots cast. Mugica lay some of the blame on Maduro's opponents for boycotting the election, which meant its representatives weren't present at the polls as a safeguard.
In addition to confirming a manipulation of the results, Mugica's declaration offered a symbolic win to Maduro's opponents: They got more than 7.5 million people to cast ballots in a poll two weeks before Sunday's election. Opposition leaders said early on the government would try to best their result.
On Wednesday, the opposition-held parliament cleared the day's agenda and immediately demanded an investigation into the vote, which elected a new all-powerful legislative body expected to be seated Thursday. The opposition refused to participate in the vote because Venezuela's constitution first requires a referendum asking voters if they want a new constituent assembly.
Smartmatic's unheard-of admission came moments after Reuters, citing internal data from Venezuela's electoral council, reported earlier Wednesday that only 3.7 million had cast ballots by 5:30 p.m. Sunday, making it highly unlikely that 8.1 million voted by the time most polls closed at 7 p.m. A respected election day exit poll estimated less than 4 million people had voted.
"This is an earthquake of worldwide proportions, because what we'd been screaming at the top of our lungs has complete confirmation," National Assembly President Julio Borges told reporters Wednesday. "Smartmatic has declared it has hard, incontrovertible data that not only were the constituent elections fraudulent at a constitutional level, but because all the results the national electoral council read that night are absolutely fraudulent."
Borges said he had "no doubt" electoral council members could be guilty of a crime by manipulating election results.
The only electoral council member from the opposition, Luis Emilio Rondon, said Tuesday he couldn't endorse announced vote tallies. He rattled off a list of election day irregularities that included lax auditing and the fact that poll workers didn't dip voters' fingers in indelible ink to prevent them from casting multiple ballots. At the last minute before the election, the electoral council allowed voters for the first time to vote at any precinct in their municipality.
Borges said Wednesday the parliament would ask the country's chief federal prosecutor, a Maduro loyalist-turned-critic, to investigate the results. The new constituent assembly, however, is expected to dissolve the existing legislature and dismiss prosecutor Luisa Ortega. Maduro's ruling socialist party controls all other public institutions.
As lawmakers entered and exited the legislative palace in downtown Caracas, they were jeered by crowds of Maduro supporters.
