CIA declassifies evidence of electoral machinery used by chavismo in Venezuela since 2012

Published on 17/07/2026 - 13:48 GMT+2•Updated

14:31

The declassification ordered by the White House has brought to light what Venezuela's opposition had long claimed without official evidence: that the Bolivarian government possessed the technical infrastructure needed to alter election results.

The documents refer back to the 2012 elections, when an already ill Hugo Chávez defeated Henrique Capriles after a year of runaway public spending, at $70 billion (€60 billion).

According to the CIA, three bodies - the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, the Bolivarian Intelligence Service and the National Electoral Council – were able to manipulate results using pre-programmed voting machines, with the capacity to shift at least 1.5 million votes in areas with the strongest pro-Chávez support.

Trump summed it up in his own way, saying there was "a specific plot to enormously favour the corrupt regime in Venezuela". What the reports do not confirm is whether this mechanism was actually activated during that election. In fact, Capriles acknowledged his defeat at the time.

From Maduro's succession to the 2017 Constituent Assembly

The pattern shifted a few months later. After Chávez's death in March 2013, Nicolás Maduro beat Capriles by a narrow margin, and this time the opposition did lodge complaints of irregularities.

The CIA found no conclusive evidence in that case that it was necessary to manipulate the result, but the story changes with the 2017 National Constituent Assembly election, which was boycotted by opposition parties.

It was Smartmatic itself, the company in charge of the voting system, that warned the turnout figures had been inflated by at least one million votes.

The Constituent Assembly, initially chaired by Delcy Rodríguez, was convened to put an end to the street protests that had erupted months earlier and ultimately ended without drafting a single article of the new constitution it had been created to produce.

The same scheme, the agency notes, was available for the 2020 parliamentary elections, although in the end it was not needed: the opposition chose not to take part after the Chavista movement seized the registration documents of several parties and disqualified a number of opposition leaders. Neither Washington nor Brussels recognised the process.

The 2024 fraud and institutions left untouched

The most serious episode, in July 2024, did not even require technical sophistication: the Chavista camp directly altered the figures to overturn Edmundo González Urrutia's victory over Maduro, with the tally sheets showing 7 million votes against 3, leaving no room for doubt. The opposition documented that result thanks to the QR codes on the electoral records, now an essential reference point in any reconstruction of that election.

More than six months after the fall of the regime and the installation of a new government under international supervision, none of the three bodies singled out by the CIA has been dismantled.

The DGCIM, SEBIN and CNE remain operational, and Elvis Amoroso, the man who, as president of the National Electoral Council, certified the fraudulent 2024 result on Maduro's orders, remains in post while the composition of a new electoral authority is being negotiated.