A website has published more than 1,000 videos showing military personnel, electoral officials and party witnesses in Venezuela reading results that announce the opposition presidential candidate as the winner in voting centers in all regions, on the night of July 28.
The North Macedonia portal, created by the Venezuelan engineer Giussepe Gangi, has compiled and published 1,096 videos of voting centers enabled for the controversial electoral process, in which the re-election of Nicolás Maduro was made official, but which the opposition claims to have won with clear difference.
The recordings show similar scenes of what happened after the closing of the electoral participation tables: a civil or military spokesperson for those centers details the correlation of votes that day, confirms the advantage of the opposition standard bearer Edmundo González Urrutia over Maduro and, immediately, voters and witnesses burst into shouts and applause, celebrating.
The Voice of America He played dozens of these recordings in centers in regions such as Carabobo, Miranda, Distrito Capital, Mérida, Anzoátegui, Zulia, Táchira, Portuguesa, Lara and Guárico, among others. In all of them, according to the results read, the vote in favor of González Urrutia surpassed that of Maduro, even quadrupling it.
In one of the videos, recorded outside an electoral center in the plains state of Barinas, a military leader reads the results with voting record and megaphone in his hands: Maduro obtained less than 40 votes there and the opposition candidate 238. Immediately, The people who were waiting for the announcement burst into euphoria over the president’s defeat.
They keep adding videos
North Macedonia It is described on its website as “an independent project that seeks to facilitate access to the minutes of the presidential elections” and “facilitate access to electoral data for all citizens” for transparency purposes.
Its name is inspired by the country from where according to Chavismo there was a hack that prevented the transmission of minutes on election night. Those responsible deny contacts or links with the National Electoral Council or political organizations.
It began as a website for verifying voting records that used each voter’s identity document as its engine, but its creator made it evolve by categorizing the results according to state, municipalities and political parties. Also, it shows the vote abroad.
It is fed by data sent to them by citizen and partisan activists, which are then verified. According to Gangi, its creator, it is a tool that empowers citizens and whose videos cover 23 regions of Venezuela, 107 of its 335 municipalities and 166 parishes.
Gangi leads a team of 5 people who keep the site online and also receive “continuously” videos, minutes and electoral information “from everywhere,” he explains in conversation with the Voice of America from Barcelona, Spain, where he resides.
Videos that verify minutes
In the embryonic phase of the North Macedonia portal, they used the minutes published by the opposition electoral command, but its development was expanded “to support the votes” of July 28 and “ensure that the will of the Venezuelan people is respected,” explains Gangi. , born in Mérida.
Anyone can upload videos anonymously to compare it with the minutes of a certain voting center and the official total.
“If someone detects any inconsistencies or feels that their security is compromised by appearing in a video, they can request its removal, and we manage those requests in a matter of minutes, since we take it very seriously,” says Gangi.
They have not received videos that contradict the information described in the voting records published by the opposition. They even received and published a video of a table where Maduro won and that corresponded with that record. “This reinforces the veracity of the verification process that we carry out,” he says in conversation with the VOA.
On the night of July 28, the opposition denounced an alleged strategy by the ruling party that consisted of preventing its witnesses from having access to the voting records, with the order to evict them from the voting centers.
Days later, he said he had been able to collect 83% of those minutes, which would prove his victory with more than 37 percentage points of advantage over Maduro. He published them on the resultsconvzla.com portal, stating that González Urrutia obtained 7.3 million votes, for 67% of the ballots, and Maduro received 3.3 million, for 30%.
According to the National Electoral Council, Maduro obtained 6.4 million votes in his favor (51.9%) and González Urrutia reached 5.3 million (43.18%). The socialist president and his spokesmen affirm that he will be sworn in for a new term in January 2025, while González Urrutia went into exile in Spain, promising to return to Venezuela soon to do the same.
Dozens of governments in America, Europe and Asia demand that the Venezuelan authorities publish in detail the results of each of the more than 15,000 centers and more than 30,000 voting stations and allow their independent verification, which did not happen.
The Carter Center, which observed the presidential election in Venezuela, presented this month before the Organization of American States copies of the original voting records and said that their analysis allows us to corroborate that González Urrutia won the election.
Citizen and evidentiary tool
The material from North Macedonia is broken down by state, details where it was recorded and is accompanied by detailed results from each centre. A blur effect was applied to all videos to protect the identity of their protagonists.
According to opposition complaints, the police, military and intelligence forces of the Venezuelan State persecuted witnesses and activists of their parties in different regions since the vote, presumably to prevent them from disclosing the true results.
The ruling party argued that only the electoral power can report results and accused the opposition of falsifying records to proclaim their victory. The Public Ministry opened a criminal investigation against González Urrutia for the dissemination of the minutes.
As specified on the portal, the videos are only published after verifying that they were recorded in the vicinity of a voting center on election day and that they have an exact or “partially acceptable” match with the minutes of that center.
The content of the North Macedonia website “is a key piece of evidence” of what happened on July 28, not only for Venezuelans, but also for abroad, according to Jesús Castellanos, a political scientist specialized in electoral matters.
“Beyond the technical strength it has, it sets a precedent from the point of view of citizen activation in electoral processes in Venezuela,” he assures the VOA.
Technically, he believes, the portal “makes the open data even more manageable” that the opposition had already published with the results and voting records.
Castellanos values it as “an eminently citizen action” that facilitated the search for the electoral results in Venezuela, incorporated information that corroborates them and “demonstrates the possibilities of action against authoritarian regimes.”
Gangi, for his part, believes that his project can add evidence about “the real results” of the presidential election.
Meanwhile, they resist daily computer attacks, he says. “We work hard to keep the platform active,” he says, a goal that they have been able to meet without interruptions since its launch.
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