Venezuela’s electoral authorities declared Nicolás Maduro the winner of the country’s presidential elections, but opposition candidates have questioned the integrity of the results.
Social media posts claim that a video shows people stealing ballot boxes from local election sites. The footage shows masked men rushing out of an orange building, carrying large, white, square objects.
“UNDEMOCRATIC: In Punta Cardón, Falcón State, Venezuela, it is reported that several masked men stormed a local voting station and stole the ballot boxes transporting then to an undisclosed location afterwards,” a July 28 X post says, using “then” when it probably meant “them.”
A July 29 X post says: “Venezuelan Gangs Under Control of Dictator Nicolas Maduro Continue Raiding Voting Polls & Stealing the Ballot Boxes in an Attempt to Overthrow the 2024 Venezuelan Presidential Election.”
Spanish-language posts shared the same video and made similar claims.
But these posts misidentify what the men are carrying. They’re toting air conditioning units; the video shows that the objects have vents on the sides and a gray back.
Screenshot of X post from July 28, 2024.
The official ballot boxes in Venezuela are light brown and have the National Electoral Council logo — the letters “CNE” (for Consejo Nacional Electoral) and three lines (yellow, blue and red), which represent the Venezuelan flag’s colors.
A man votes July 28, 2024, in the presidential election in Caracas, Venezuela. (AP)
A woman in the social media video can be heard using profanity in Spanish and talking about air conditioner units, giving the impression that the units are being taken without permission.
PolitiFact couldn’t find this video’s origin, but some Facebook users commented that they had seen the video years ago, one said as far back as 2013.
Questions over Venezuela’s election outcome
In Venezuela, votes are counted in two ways. One way is via a digital count that is sent to the electoral authorities through encrypted phone lines. The other way involves printed ballots; machines in a voting site print a ballot confirming a person’s vote, then that ballot is put in a box. The machines also print a tabulation with all the registered votes at the end of the election.
The ballots and tabulations must match to confirm the results from each polling site, according to the Observatorio Electoral Venezolano, a Venezuela-based nongovernmental organization that monitors and analyzes elections.
After the July 28 election, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Tokyo, expressed concerns that the Venezuelan election result “does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people.”
“It’s critical that every vote be counted fairly and transparently, that election officials immediately share information with the opposition and independent observers without delay, and that the electoral authorities publish the detailed tabulation of votes. The international community is watching this very closely and will respond accordingly,” Blinken told reporters July 29.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado claimed that the election results were fraudulent. (Edmundo González Urrutia replaced Machado as the opposition presidential candidate when the Maduro-controlled Supreme Tribunal of Justice banned Machado from running for any office for 15 years.)
“I mean this is not just another fraud, I mean this is grossly, grossly ignoring and violating popular sovereignty, there is no way they can explain and justify this, not with the information we have,” Machado said, speaking in Spanish, July 29 to national and international media outlets.
Machado said the election results delivered by the Venezuelan government were “impossible,” because they conflicted with the voting tabulations her team collected, which she said showed 6.2 million votes for González Urrutia and 2.8 million for Maduro.
“We have in our hands the voting tabulations that demonstrate our historic, categorical and mathematically irreversible triumph,” González Urrutia said, speaking in Spanish, July 29.
The New York Times reported July 28 that “officials at some polling places refused to release printouts verifying the electronic vote count, and there were reports of voter intimidation and other irregularities.”
NBC News also reported July 29 about voter intimidation and irregularities at voting centers during the election.
Our ruling
Social media posts claim that a video shows “several masked men stormed a local voting station and stole the ballot boxes” during Venezuela’s 2024 election.
But the video shows men carrying air conditioning units.
The Venezuelan opposition called the election results fraudulent and some news outlets have reported election irregularities at some voting sites. But this video doesn’t show stolen ballot boxes in Venezuela. We rate this claim False.
