Venezuelan electoral authorities said that more than 8 million people, or 41.53 percent of registered voters, voted to create a constitutional assembly endowing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s ruling socialist party with virtually unlimited powers — a turnout more than double that estimated by outsiders and opponents who derided the announcement.
Members of the opposition said they believed between 2 million and 3 million people voted and one well-respected independent analysis put the number at 3.6 million.
Opposition leader Henrique Capriles yesterday urged Venezuelans to protest.
Photo: Bloomberg
Maduro said he would use the assembly’s powers to bar opposition candidates from running in gubernatorial elections in December unless they sit with his party to negotiate an end to hostilities that have generated four months of protests that have killed at least 125 and wounded nearly 2,000.
Across the capital, Venezuelans had appeared to be staying away from the polls in huge numbers in protest against the vote.
The Venezuelan chief prosecutor’s office reported 10 deaths in clashes between protesters and police. Seven police officers were wounded when a fiery explosion went off as they drove past piles of trash that had been used to blockade a street in an opposition stronghold in eastern Caracas.
An exit poll based on surveys from 110 voting centers by New York investment bank Torino Capital and a Venezuela public opinion company estimated that 3.6 million people voted, or about 18.5 percent of registered voters.
“The results thus suggest that the government maintains an important loyal core of supporters that it can mobilize in both electoral and non-electoral scenarios,” the report said.
The report also said that Venezuela has an estimated 2.6 million government employees, “suggesting that a large fraction of the votes could have not been voluntary.”
Several nations, including Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Spain, Britain and the US, said they would not recognize the vote.
The EU also expressed concern over the “fate of democracy in Venezuela,” and said that such an assembly “elected under doubtful and often violent circumstances cannot be part of the solution.”
Opposition leaders had called for a boycott of the vote, declaring it rigged for the ruling party, and by late afternoon they were declaring the apparent low turnout to be a resounding victory.
The winners among the 5,500 ruling-party candidates running for 545 seats in the constituent assembly will have the task of rewriting the nation’s constitution and will have powers above and beyond other state institutions.
Describing the vote as “the election of a power that’s above and beyond every other,” Maduro said he wants the assembly to strip opposition lawmakers and governors of constitutional immunity from prosecution — one of the few remaining checks on ruling party power.
He said the new assembly would begin to govern within a week, with its first task in rewriting the constitution to be “a total transformation” of the office of the chief prosecutor, a former government loyalist who has become the highest-ranking official to publicly split from the president.
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