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

By Jesús Maturana Published on 17/07/2026 - 13:48 GMT+2 Share Comments Add Euronews on Google Share Facebook Twitter Flipboard Send Reddit Linkedin Messenger Telegram VK Bluesky Threads Whatsapp CIA documents declassified by Donald Trump confirm that the Venezuelan regime had, from 2012, a machine able to alter up to 1.5 million votes, though they do not prove fraud in every election mentioned. The declassification ordered by the White House has brought to light something Venezuela's opposition had been repeating for years without official evidence: the Bolivarian regime possessed the technical infrastructure needed to alter an election result. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT The documents refer back to the 2012 elections, when an already ill Hugo Chávez defeated Henrique Capriles after a year of runaway public spending, put at 70 billion dollars. 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: there was, he said, "a specific plot to enormously favour the corrupt regime in Venezuela". What the reports do not confirm is that this mechanism was actually activated in that election. In fact, Capriles acknowledged his defeat at the time. View Gallery 4 Photos From Maduro's succession to the 2017 Constituent Assembly The pattern shifts a few months later. After Chávez's death in March 2013, Nicolás Maduro beat Capriles by a minimal margin, and this time the opposition did lodge complaints of irregularities. The CIA finds no conclusive evidence in that episode that it was necessary to force the result, but the story changes with the 2017 National Constituent Assembly, an election boycotted by opposition parties. It was Smartmatic itself, the company in charge of the voting system, that warned that the turnout figures had been inflated by at least one million votes. That Constituent Assembly, initially chaired by Delcy Rodríguez, was convened to stop the street protests of those months and ended without drafting a single article of the new constitution it claimed to be pursuing. The same scheme, the agency notes, was available for the 2020 parliamentary elections, even though, at the end, it was not needed: the opposition chose not to take part after the Chavista movement seized the registration papers of several parties and disqualified various leaders. Neither Washington nor Brussels recognised that 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 with 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, is still in post while the make-up of a new electoral authority is negotiated. Go to accessibility shortcuts Share Comments Add Euronews on Google Read more Europe Today: Trump-Iran standoff tests the limits of diplomacy US recognises Venezuela's opposition candidate as president-elect months after election Venezuela's government rejects EU vote to recognise opposition leader as election winner USA Venezuela Electoral fraud