THE EUROPEAN UNION is the latest in a slew of western allies to voice “great concern” over the results of the most recent Presidential election in Venezuela.

Last month, Nicolás Maduro and his Socialist party declared a heavily-contested victory – claiming he had won 51% of the vote – after the 28 July election.

However, analysis conducted by opposition party, Vente Venezuela, disputes the official tally by the state-controlled electoral commission and the declared result by Maduro. The party claims its candidate Edmundo Gonzalez won the election.

Since, protests and violent clashes with police by Gonzalez supporters have continued including at a rally in Caracas yesterday, where thousands of voters took to the streets to support the Vente party and dispute the election results.

The EU yesterday said it has been continuing to monitor the situation and has joined the United States and other South American countries in their call on the Venezuelan electoral commission to publish the official result tallies.

“Without evidence to support them, the results published on 2nd August by the CNE cannot be recognised,” the EU’s Foreign Affairs Commissioner Josep Borrell said on Sunday.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets this weekend to voice their opposition of the election results. Alamy Alamy

“Any attempt to delay the full publication of the official voting records will only cast further doubt on the credibility of the officially published results,” he added.

So far, the National Electoral Council has continued to support the narrative that Maduro won the election – but has yet to publish any evidence of it. The Council’s president blamed “massive attacks” on the “technological infrastructure” for the delay.

Tallies published by the opposition, and reviewed by several independent organisations, have shown that González won the Presidential elections by a significant majority.

Third-party analysis by the Associated Press, processed almost 24,000 images of tally sheets, representing the results from 79% of voting machines.

Each sheet encoded vote counts in QR codes, which the AP programmatically decoded and analysed, resulting in tabulations of 10.26 million votes.

According to the calculations, Gonzalez received 6.89 million votes, nearly half a million more than the government says Maduro won. The tabulations also show Maduro received 3.13 million votes from the tally sheets released.

The EU has called for more independent verification to be conducted, adding that the analysis should be carried out by an “internationally reputed entity”.

The bloc also called for peace from voters and restraint from Venezuelan authorities, warning them to uphold human rights and protest freedoms. 

The National Electoral Council said on Friday that, based on 96.87% of tally sheets, Maduro had won 6.4 million votes and Gonzalez had 5.3 million. No such evidence has been published so far.