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Report in alliance with the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA)
The day of the presidential election in Venezuela ended with many irregularities and, in view of the awarding of the victory of the process by the electoral arbiter (CNE) to Nicolás Maduro in what would be the fastest proclamation in the democratic history of the country, Venezuelans and the international community have more questions than certainties about the results presented by the electoral body.
On the other hand, after the CNE’s announcement, the opposition led by María Corina Machado and candidate Edmundo González Urrutia claimed to have 73.20% of the precincts. According to the calculations of the opposition, these tally sheets reflect a difference in favor of Edmundo Gonzalez of 3,515,926 votes over Nicolas Maduro, making him the actual winner of the process.
What do the independent national and international media say?
Venezuelan and regional independent media carried out apotheosis coverage of the elections in the country. In a context in which traditional media are aligned with the pro-government narrative and in which the regime blocked more than 60 news web portals, digital media joined in a live broadcast that began on Saturday, July 27, one day before the electoral process.
#VenezuelaVota was an alliance led by the independent media outlet “El Pitazo” that united more than 100 journalists and more than 120 media partners from Venezuela and the world who reported live the details of this historic electoral process.
Also noteworthy was the transmission of VPITV, an online news channel that broadcast live from July 28 to July 29.
On July 28, organizations, independent media and citizens made active use of all digital spaces for information, reporting and denunciation. In X we were able to register the historical record for the highest number of socio-political hashtags positioned in a single day in the Venezuelan conversation in ProBox data.
In partnership with the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), our team also compared conversations on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp public groups and Telegram public channels in two 12-hour periods -the first being Sunday, July 28, from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and the second being Sunday, July 28 – Monday, July 29, from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. ET. DDIA analyzed conversations picked up by Crowdtangle and Palver featuring the keywords “elecciones” and “Venezuela,” in Spanish, located in Venezuela, on these mentioned platforms (around 2,000 pieces of content analyzed total)
In the first 12-hour period, between 6:00 a.m. ET and 6:00 p.m. ET, before and during the voting process, the bulk of posts were seemingly positive in sentiment. Many Venezuelan independent accounts and news media posting to these platforms depicted voters’ excitement about casting their ballots and celebrated high rates of voter turnout.
Posts about violence were few, but did surface. On Facebook, for example, one of the posts with the most shares was a video posted by a group with more than 33,000 members showing a woman who was shot (in the foot) during the voting process. Although the situation occurred, this piece of content falsely suggested other violent acts were taking place in various voting precincts across the country.
Around the same time, a video from VPITv, a news media outlet with 112,000 followers on Facebook, showing a military woman refusing to shake Maria Corina Machado’s hand began to circulate. The video generated the highest level of “angry” reactions of any post on Facebook analyzed during that time, according to DDIA.
Several messages seen on public WhatsApp and Telegram channels during Election Day highlighted comments from the international community about Election Day. At this point, many of the posts noted that despite delays, the voting process had been a calm one.
Around the time polls began closing, between 5:45 p.m. ET and 6:45 p.m. ET, Venezuelans were still celebrating high levels of voter turnout. On Instagram, during that hour, one of the posts with the most views of all accounts analyzed by DDIA discussed Venezuelans in Chile voting, and celebrating.
Around the same time, voters inside Venezuela began to express trepidation about the timing of the release of official results. On Facebook, the most-shared posts weighed in on both the high levels of voter participation in the elections and expressed uncertainty around the release of official results (mostly around timing). A few hours earlier, Venezuelan fact-checkers had reported on the circulation of an unverified exit poll showing Maduro as the leading candidate. On WhatsApp, unverified exit polls were also circulating, these emphasizing Edmundo’s potential victory.
After 6:00 p.m. ET, the conversations online seemingly took a turn as more negative sentiments began to emerge around the time the CNE first announced victory for Nicolás Maduro without proof and without disclosing the vote count, Venezuelans’ tone online took a turn toward “angry” as evidenced by reactions on Facebook in posts connected to claims Maduro had won the election, per DDIA’s monitoring on Meta’s Crowdtangle and Palver.
Source: DDIA/CrowdTangle
On Facebook, even as the total number of sentiments picked up by the tools rose, the number of “angry” reactions went up 9.74 points, from 24.25% (Election Day) to 34.26% (12h after polls closed).
Source: DDIA/CrowdTangle
On public WhatsApp channels based in Venezuela, the change in the mood was even clearer. The percentage of messages automatically labeled as “negative” (through natural language processes) scaled 22.1 points, going from 17.9% (of 106 total) during the Election Day to 40% (of 65 total) in the 12h after the polls closed. The amount of “positive” messages, on the other hand, registered a decrease: from 14.2% to 3% of all sentiments monitored and collected in the same time frame.
Source: DDIA/Palver
On Instagram, overnight, between the hours of Sunday, July 28, 6:00 p.m. ET, and Monday, July 29, at 6:00 a.m. ET, one of the posts with more interactions cited the need to calmly respect the electoral process. On WhatsApp public groups, the most-shared messages were about the international reaction to CNE’s announcement. Argentina had already called the results fraudulent. Venezuelans on all platforms began sharing posts asking for international support to assure vote counts were concluded and legitimacy upheld.
And, into the morning of Monday, July 29, from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. ET, on 5,500 WhatsApp public groups analyzed by DDIA based in Venezuela, messages being repeated featured links to content:
- Of Edmundo saying the world knew what happened in Venezuela
- Suggesting that not all votes had been accounted for and that the outcome could be different than what the regime claimed it to be
- The U.S. was worried and that Colombia could be called to audit the votes.
On public Telegram channels, an image showing Maduro holding up his hand was shared more than 27 times on July 29, from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. ET. The image carried the Iran-owned HispanTV logo. Around the same time, other authoritarian countries (Nicaragua and Russia) recognized Maduro’s victory and their comments were also popular online.
During July 28 restrictions to the press were also reported in the coverage of the process and some complaints about incidents such as delays in the opening of some centers, highlighting long queues due -mainly- to the high influx of citizen participation from early hours in the voting centers.
Ipys Venezuela documented 32 cases that constitute 41 violations of press freedom during the presidential elections of July 28. These limitations affected 26 reporters, five photojournalists and two cameramen.
The first detentions of press workers occurred on July 30. From July 25 to 31, the National Union of Press Workers reported at least 14 international press workers were deported and increased doxing incidents against journalists on social media.
NGO Provea, in collaboration with Monitor de Víctimas, press correspondents, and hospitals, recorded 17 deaths between the night of July 28 and the afternoon of July 31.
NGO Foro Penal also reported at least 672 verified arrests from July 29 to 31, with the highest numbers in Capital District (111) and Anzoátegui state (110).
At ProBox we closely followed the political conversation in Venezuela before, during and after the elections. Especially because in the face of censorship, social media platforms have retaken the spotlight for verified information, as well as for the rise of disinformation. On July 28 we registered the highest number of socio-political trends positioned in X in Venezuela in a single day so far this year, with at least 15 hashtags and 7 keywords totaling more than 835 thousand tweets altogether:
#LaHoraDeVenezuela 📊 A las 06:00 PM 🇻🇪 de este #28Jul hemos registrado el mayor número de tendencias sociopolíticas posicionadas en X en Venezuela en un solo día en lo que va del año, con al menos 15 etiquetas y 7 keywords que destacan; sumando más de 835 mil tweets en conjunto:… pic.twitter.com/J2bNIkH2vr
— ProBox (@ProBoxVE) July 28, 2024
July ended with 93 socio-political hashtags trending on X, an all-time monthly record since we started monitoring them in 2019. These totaled more than 4.2 million messages and 63 of these are electoral. What is most relevant is also that between Sunday, July 28 and Wednesday, July 31, 36 trends were registered; an average of 9 per day in the last 4 days of the month, another historical record.
#VenezuelaLibre stands out as the most relevant trend, not only in the month of July but also so far in 2024, positioning itself on July 28 and remaining active until at least July 30; managing to collect more than 850,000 messages, being the hashtag with the highest number of tweets so far this year. This was driven by citizens, political parties, media and opposition leadership.
Electoral disinformation
Complaints about disinformation about the electoral process were generated after noon on election day, when media aligned with the ruling party began to disseminate exit polls, which not only violate the electoral law but were generated by recently created companies of dubious origin.
The dissemination of false polls is not something new, from ProBox in conjunction with C-Informa, we have investigated the dissemination of false polls in favor of Nicolás Maduro.
However, what up to that moment had been a relatively peaceful day (at least for the Venezuelan authoritarian context), changed in the afternoon of Sunday 28th, after early declarations from different government spokespersons “suggesting” that Maduro was the winner of the process, long before the official release of the results of the electoral body.
In addition to this, the radical ruling party has dedicated itself to promote trends against Machado with hashtags such as #ComanditosDelTerror and #CarcelParaLaSayona on July 29, asserting that the “comanditos” to safeguard votes are really groups of criminals. Together, these trends accumulated around 30,000 messages. On July 31, the pro-government troops were promoting the trend “#Comanditos” with more than 2,700 tweets replicating Delcy Rodriguez’s post in response to Kamala Harris about the violence “orchestrated by the opposition”.
While the opposition demanded transparency regarding the votes, on July 31, a message suggesting that “the CNE is still within the accepted time frame allowed for the counting and release of electoral information” and that it is thus “the target of “extreme” and “imperialist” pressure from internal and external actors” has received the double arrow sign of virality from Meta (this symbol is applied when a message is forwarded through a chain of five or more chats) .
The same piece of content (pasted below) went viral also criticizing the opposition for publicly showing non-certified electoral documents.
What does Officialism say?
The Venezuelan powers aligned themselves in what the opposition and different countries of the region consider an electoral fraud. On July 28, after the closing of the polling stations, the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodriguez, made a statement in which he stated between the lines that the victory of Nicolás Maduro was resounding, violating electoral regulations..
Rodriguez’s pre-announcement was confirmed hours later, in the early morning of July 29, by the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, who announced in a first bulletin and with 80% of the votes counted that the winner was Nicolás Maduro. Less than 12 hours after this announcement, Amoroso was already proclaiming Maduro as president elect for the period 2025-2031, without even publishing the results in the CNE portal.
That same morning of July 29, a statement was read from the Public Prosecutor’s Office accusing María Corina Machado of an alleged violation of the electoral system on July 28. According to Tarek William Saab, the slowing down of the bulletin from the CNE occurred due to a “computer attack coming from North Macedonia” in which the responsible parties were Lester Toledo, Leopoldo López and Machado.
With all this narrative that began directly with the issuance of the first CNE bulletin, Nicolás Maduro assured that “a coup d’état by the opposition” was being planned.
On the morning of July 30, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) made a statement. Venezuelan Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino, expressed the “absolute loyalty and unconditional support” of the Armed Forces to Nicolás Maduro, in the midst of protests against his questioned reelection.
That same day, Maduro urged the population to use the VenApp application to denounce people who protest. This set off international alarms about the danger of citizens being accused and arrested by the regime, so Apple and Android removed the app from their app store. The word “VenApp” was trending for more than 24 hours with more than 80,400 tweets since that statement from Maduro.
According to DDIA, in the first 24 hours after the new feature on VenApp was released, posts on Facebook called on Venezuelans to report the app to Google Play and the Apple Store. One single post with a clear call to action was shared on this platform more than 1,800 times between July 30, 9:00 p.m. ET, and July 31, 9:00 p.m. ET. A sentiment analysis of Facebook posts collected in this period of time indicated a peak of “sad” reactions at 7:30am ET on July 31, when Venezuelans woke up to the information about the new use of VenApp.
On Instagram, references to historical moments also popped up, with mentions to “nueva lista Tascón” and “operación tun tun”. Maduro’s supporters would post handles of opposition members who were protesting, while opposition members would expose digital accounts (profiles and channels) that were supposedly doxxing voters who had cast their ballots for Edmundo.
On July 31, Nicolás Maduro requested the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice to have the last word on the ballots through an injunction on what he described as an “international plot”.
From his X account, Tarek William Saab, has been publishing the arrests throughout the country, using photos with the faces of the detainees, despite the fact that this is prohibited in Venezuela. In the middle of a press conference on July 31, the Prosecutor pointed out that the alleged victims of the demonstrations “were staged” and that “they used tomato sauce” to pretend to be injured or even dead.
On July 30, the Ministry of Communication and Information (MIPPCI) did not promote any hashtags of the day for the first time since ProBox’s monitoring of the Venezuelan conversation on X began in 2019.
On July 31, MIPPCI returned to its routine of pushing hashtags with “#VenezuelaEsPaz” but failed to become a trending topic.
What is the opposition denouncing?
The Venezuelan opposition led by María Corina Machado and Edmundo González declared electoral fraud. After the closing of the polling stations, different actors of the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática denounced on July 28 a paralyzation in the delivery of tally sheets, as well as the restriction of access to the CNE to be electoral guarantors in the tallying process.
On Instagram, a post depicting Delsa Rodriguez (they meant Delsa Solorzano) denouncing her not being able to enter the CNE during the afternoon was the third post with the most interactions of all posts analyzed by DDIA between 5:45 pm ET and 6:45 pm ET that day.
The word “actas” has been trending on X since July 28 with more than 1.3 million posts, at least as of July 31.
After the announcement by the CNE of Maduro’s supposed victory in the early morning of July 29, María Corina Machado’s statements were forceful: there was fraud, Edmundo González won with 70% of the votes.
On social media and messaging apps, new and strong calls for international support (here and here, for example) for transparency and accountability emerged from the opposition.
In a press conference on Monday, July 29 at 7 pm Venezuela time, Machado and González gave more details of their denunciation, saying that they had the evidence to prove that they won. “With 73.20% of the polling station records in hand” the opposition leader gave figures: “the votes in favor of Maduro were 2,759,256, while Edmundo González obtained 6,275,182 votes.”
The opposition also informed of an online portal to consult the electoral records they have in hand and assure that the victory is for Edmundo González. This portal was blocked on July 30, adding to the list of more than 60 information portals that the Maduro regime has blocked in recent years.
Persecution of opponents
Members of María Corina’s political team have been detained throughout the electoral campaign. After the July 28 presidential elections, this situation continued.
Freddy Superlano, national political coordinator of Voluntad Popular and one of the main opposition leaders working alongside María Corina Machado, was arrested on Tuesday, July 30 at around 10:00 am by agents of the Maduro government. There is still no information on his whereabouts or even which State body carried out the capture. The keyword “Freddy Superlano” was trending on X for at least 24 hours with around 90,400 messages.
Messages suggesting that Superlano might have been tortured circulated widely on Facebook, Instagram (here and here, for example) and public Venezuela-based WhatsApp groups. Messages highlighting that his wife could not get any information about his whereabouts also registered high engagement levels.
Tension was also felt around the Argentine embassy in Venezuela, where six members of María Corina Machado’s team have been taking refuge since March. On the afternoon of July 29, police surrounded the embassy after the decision of the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry to break diplomatic relations with that country. On July 31, the Argentine officials were given a deadline to leave the country. The date would be met on Thursday night, August 1st,
María Corina Machado and Edmundo González have also been threatened with imprisonment. In view of this, the Costa Rican government offered its embassy to receive both of them, to which the opposition leader responded with gratitude, but emphasizing that her responsibility is to “continue this struggle together with the people”.
Agradezco la generosa hospitalidad del gobierno de Costa Rica como reacción a la brutal represión del régimen de Maduro en contra de los ciudadanos que defendemos los resultados de la elección presidencial del 28 de julio.
Nuestra prioridad es la protección de nuestros compañeros…— María Corina Machado (@MariaCorinaYA) July 30, 2024
What does the international community say?
Following the announcement of the CNE and the statements made by María Corina Machado, countries from all over the world, as well as international organizations have pronounced themselves and have questioned the electoral result.
Initially, the United States, Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Panama, Chile, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, the European Union and Norway expressed concerns about what is happening in Venezuela and demanded that the CNE audit and publish the results.
Subsequently, the government of Spain made a statement to request the electoral records, just as Gustavo Petro did in Colombia to ask for a “transparent scrutiny”.
Maduro’s allies have indicated their support for Chavismo; among the countries that congratulated the president are: Russia, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Honduras, Iran and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Organizations such as the Carter Center and the UN also raised their voices to demand the CNE to immediately publish the results of the presidential elections at the polling station level.
The UN called for “total transparency” in the results, while the Carter Center published on the night of July 30 a strong report in which it described the elections as “undemocratic”. It did so after withdrawing its staff from the country in the face of escalating protests. The keyword “Centro Carter” was trending on X with more than 300 thousand messages.
Another strong report came from the Organization of American States (OAS).
“The Department for Electoral Cooperation and Observation (DECO) of the Secretariat for Strengthening Democracy (SFD) of the Organization of American States (OAS) considers that, under the current circumstances, the results announced by the National Electoral Council (CNE) proclaiming Nicolás Maduro the winner in the presidential election of Sunday, July 28 in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela cannot be recognized.”
International isolation
In view of the international stance, on July 29 the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry decided to withdraw its diplomatic personnel from seven countries: Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, Dominican Republic and Uruguay.
That same day, at 10:11 pm, the Minister of Transportation, Ramón Velásquez Araguayán, announced through a statement published in his X account, that as from July 31 at 8:00 pm flights from Panama and the Dominican Republic, as well as those departing from Venezuela to this route would be suspended. It was also announced that flights to Peru are suspended.
And the Venezuelan people?
The media reported that on the morning of July 29 the streets of the country were clear, calm, with no activity. Subsequently, pots and pans began to be banged in Caracas, a new “Cacerolazo” as a form of protest.
As the afternoon progressed, mobilizations and street and avenue closures were reported in different points of the country. Protests continued to increase throughout July 29 and 30, being repressed and dispersed with tear gas by the Bolivarian National Guard.
María Corina Machado and Edmundo González led one of the rallies on 30J in Caracas, from where they ratified the victory of the opposition candidate and the possession of the electoral records that prove it.
The last balance of repression registered by the Penal Forum (July 31 at 9:00am) reflects since July 29, 2024 and up to that moment 429 verified arrests and 11 deaths. Also reported through social networks was a form of protest that is repeated throughout the country: the toppling of statues of the late President Hugo Chavez.
The keyword “Maria Corina” remained a trending topic from July 28 to 31, with more than 1.37 million messages.
What is expected?
The situation in Venezuela is complex. In her message, after the CNE results were known, the opposition leader had asked Venezuelans to go out as a family to take care of the votes. Now the message is to go to street assemblies all over the country every day from 11 am to 12 noon.
“We ask that they go as a family, we do not call for violence because one to the family does not lead to violent acts,” Machado pointed out.
The first assembly has already taken place. In cities all over the country, people gathered to support the opposition message. In Caracas, María Corina Machado and Edmundo arrived at Altamira to ratify their position to make the will of the people be respected and pointed out that they already have 73% of the votes cast.
