CIA files confirm Venezuelan vote-rigging capacity
Newly declassified CIA documents confirm Venezuela's former regime built a system capable of altering millions of votes, yet the key institutions behind it remain active under the country's new internationally supervised government.
Declassified by Donald Trump, the CIA reports corroborate what the Venezuelan opposition long alleged but could never officially prove. From 2012, the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, the Bolivarian Intelligence Service and the National Electoral Council possessed voting machines capable of shifting at least 1.5 million votes. Trump described the findings as evidence of "a specific plot to enormously favour the corrupt regime in Venezuela."
The documents do not establish that this infrastructure was activated when Hugo Chávez defeated Henrique Capriles in 2012, a contest preceded by $70 billion (€60 billion) in public spending. The CIA also found no conclusive proof of manipulation when Nicolás Maduro narrowly succeeded Chávez in 2013. The system was, however, implicated in 2017, when Smartmatic, the company operating the voting technology, warned that turnout figures for the National Constituent Assembly had been inflated by at least one million votes.
The 2017 vote was boycotted by the opposition, and the resulting assembly, initially chaired by Delcy Rodríguez, failed to draft a new constitution. The same manipulation scheme remained available for the 2020 parliamentary elections, but was not deployed because the Chavista movement seized party registration documents and disqualified leaders. Neither Washington nor Brussels recognised that process.
By the July 2024 presidential election, the regime abandoned technical sophistication for brute force. Tallies extracted via QR codes showed Edmundo González Urrutia defeating Maduro by seven million votes to three million, a result the electoral council simply overwrote on Maduro's orders.
For European policymakers and investors, the most pressing detail is institutional rather than historical. More than six months after Maduro's fall and the installation of a new government under international supervision, the three state bodies identified by the CIA remain fully operational.
Elvis Amoroso, the National Electoral Council president who certified the fraudulent 2024 result, retains his post while a new electoral authority is negotiated. Until the military counterintelligence directorate, the intelligence service and the electoral council are dismantled, the structural foundations for election interference remain intact. Their survival complicates Venezuela's return to normalised economic and diplomatic relations with Europe.
