As the list of countries challenging Venezuela's presidential election results continues to pile up, one of the most reputable international observers of the electoral process has demanded that detailed results be released immediately, casting a doubt on Maduro's victory until then.
The Carter Center a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization invited by Venezuela's National Election Commission (known by the Spanish acronym CNE), issued a press release on Monday that reads:
The Carter Center calls upon Venezuela's National Election Commission, known by the Spanish acronym CNE, to immediately publish the presidential election results at the polling station level.
The Carter Center's technical mission came to observe the July 28 presidential election at the invitation of the CNE. The mission's assessment is based on the Venezuelan legal framework as well as regional and international standards for democratic elections.
The information contained in the polling station-level results forms as transmitted to the CNE is critical to our assessment and important for all Venezuelans.
Denounced irregularities around the election abound as several polling stations did not allow opposition observers to perform their duties and over 50% of station-level results enacted automatically after polls closed are still missing. This accounts for over 30,000 polling booths nationwide.
According to its website, The Carter Center started working with Venezuelans in 1996 to help eliminate river blindness and in 1998 to "observe elections, conduct media training, and undertake conflict resolution efforts to strengthen peace and democracy."
The Carter Center also joined forces with the Organization of American States and U.N. Development Program to help mediate a 2002 political crisis between the government and opposition groups that temporarily removed President Hugo Chavez from office. The mediation led to a recall referendum, which the Center also was invited to observe.
The week prior to the elections was filled with bans on several international observers, many of which were deported to their countries or denied entrance into Venezuela. The most prominent was a delegation of former Latin American presidents and a former vice president representing the Initiative for Democracy from Spain and the Americas (IDEA for its initials in Spanish).
The group, consisting of former Presidents Mireya Moscoso of Panama, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez of Costa Rica, Jorge Quiroga of Bolivia, and Vicente Fox of Mexico, were unable to travel to Venezuela after their Copa Airlines flight was prevented from taking off from Panama.
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