Key facts
- Declassified CIA documents indicate Venezuela's regime possessed electoral manipulation capabilities since 2012.
- The machinery could alter up to 1.5 million votes.
- The General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, Bolivarian Intelligence Service, and National Electoral Council were involved.
- The mechanism's activation is not confirmed for all elections, including the 2012 vote.
- Smartmatic reported inflated turnout figures in the 2017 Constituent Assembly election.
- Allegations of direct alteration of results were made for the July 2024 election.
Declassified CIA documents, ordered by Donald Trump, reveal that the Venezuelan regime, under the banner of Chavismo, possessed a sophisticated electoral machinery capable of altering up to 1.5 million votes since 2012. These documents confirm long-standing opposition claims about the technical infrastructure available to manipulate election outcomes.
The reports trace this capability back to the 2012 elections, where Hugo Chávez defeated Henrique Capriles. According to the CIA, three state bodies—the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, and the National Electoral Council—were allegedly able to manipulate results using pre-programmed voting machines. However, the declassified information does not conclusively prove that this mechanism was activated in the 2012 election, an outcome that Capriles acknowledged at the time.
Following Chávez's death in March 2013, Nicolás Maduro narrowly won against Capriles, an election marked by opposition complaints of irregularities. While the CIA found no definitive evidence that the manipulation mechanism was necessary for that result, the situation evolved with the 2017 National Constituent Assembly election. Smartmatic, the company responsible for the voting system, itself warned that turnout figures had been inflated by at least one million votes. This assembly was convened amidst protests and ultimately did not draft any new constitutional articles.
The CIA notes that a similar scheme was available for the 2020 parliamentary elections, though it was ultimately not utilized as the opposition boycotted the process. The most recent alleged instance of electoral manipulation occurred in July 2024, where the Chavista camp reportedly altered figures to overturn Edmundo González Urrutia's victory over Maduro, with tally sheets showing a stark difference in votes. Opposition documentation of this result relied on QR codes on electoral records.
Significantly, more than six months after the fall of the Maduro regime and with a new government operating under international supervision, the three bodies identified by the CIA—DGCIM, SEBIN, and CNE—remain operational. Elvis Amoroso, who certified the fraudulent 2024 election results under Maduro's orders, continues to hold his post while negotiations for a new electoral authority are underway.