CARACAS, (Reuters) – Venezuela’s election council said yesterday an audit of the results of presidential elections in April confirmed President Nicolas Maduro did win by 1.5 percentage points, despite opposition claims that the vote was stolen. The widely expected announcement by the National Electoral Council, which oversees elections, left losing candidate Henrique Capriles with only a court challenge remaining in what appears to be a futile effort to overturn the victory of Maduro, who succeeded the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez.
Capriles, the 40-year-old governor of Miranda state, refused to participate in what he called a “bogus audit” on the grounds it was not thorough enough to determine whether illegitimate votes had been cast.
The audit consisted of comparing paper receipts issued by electronic voting machines to a printout of the results those same machines transmitted digitally to the elections council for the purposes of tabulating votes nationwide.
