Amy Booth 
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado announced that her team had set up a parallel electronic vote counting system demonstrating that the true winner of Sunday’s elections was Edmundo González Urrutia, not Nicolás Maduro.
The pair also warned that armed individuals were at the door of the Argentine embassy in Venezuela and called for international law to be respected. Venezuela expelled the diplomatic missions of Argentina and six other countries and recalled its embassy staff on Monday afternoon. Members of Machado’s team have been in the Argentine embassy in Caracas for several months.
“To all Venezuelans, to all the democrats of the world, we have a way of proving the truth,” she said.
“From yesterday at six in the afternoon, it’s been 24 hours of uninterrupted work. The regime slept worried. We didn’t sleep,” she said.
She explained that the opposition has set up a web-based system that counts the vote tallies and allows citizens to look at the results for their ballot box by entering their national identification numbers or searching for places or specific polling stations.
With 73% of votes tallied, she said, the results showed that González Urrutia was the true victor of Sunday’s elections.
“The difference was in all the states of Venezuela. In all states, in all sectors,” she said, adding that “world leaders” were already using the portal.
González Urrutia said: “We have in our hands the records that show our categorical and mathematically irreversible triumph.” He thanked the international community for its “solidarity and support.”
“A free people is a people that commands respect, and we are going to fight for our freedom,” he said.
In the early hours of Monday morning, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council claimed that sitting President Nicolás Maduro had won the elections with 51.2% of the vote with 80% of the votes tallied, giving him a third consecutive six-year term in office. The official count gave González Urrutia 44.2% of the vote.
The Venezuelan leader has presided over an economic and humanitarian crisis, worsened by U.S.-led economic sanctions, and has been accused of grave human rights violations including torture and extrajudicial executions.
In response to questions from the press, Machado said that she had received reports of “armed, hooded people” and police at the door of the Argentine embassy in Caracas. Six of Machado’s aides requested asylum in Argentina in March after the attorney general’s office announced arrest warrants against them for conspiracy. The Venezuelan government denied them safe passage out of the country.
Pedro Urruchurtu Noselli, one of the aides, posted on X that it appeared that Venezuelan security forces were planning to enter the embassy at around 6:45 p.m. Venezuelan time (7:45 Argentine time).
Machado won Venezuela’s opposition primary, but was not allowed to stand because she is banned from holding public office due to her alleged involvement in a plot to get the United States to impose economic sanctions on Venezuela, and for voicing support for a military invasion in the country.
