Election Results Presented by Venezuela’s Opposition Suggest Maduro Lost Decisively

Venezuela’s electoral body announced on Monday that the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, comfortably won another six years in office, beating his main opponent by seven percentage points in a vote that was marred by widespread irregularities.

But partial election results, provided to The New York Times by a group of researchers associated with Venezuela’s main opposition alliance, supply new evidence that calls the official result into question.

Their figures suggest that an opposition candidate, a retired diplomat named Edmundo González, actually beat Mr. Maduro by more than 30 percentage points. The researchers’ estimate of the result — 66 percent to 31 percent — is similar to the result obtained by an independent exit poll conducted on Election Day across the country.

It was not possible for The Times to independently verify the underlying tallies, which the researchers say were collected from paper receipts produced by about 1,000 voting machines, about three percent of the country’s total. By Wednesday, Venezuela’s government-controlled election authority had still not released detailed results, despite growing international pressure.

But several independent survey and election analysts reviewed the researchers’ approach and said that, based on the tallies shared by the researchers, the estimates appeared credible. And given the partial tallies, The Times was able to broadly replicate the researchers’ estimates of the result within two percentage points.

The announcement of Mr. Maduro’s victory triggered deadly protests on Monday and led several Latin American countries to suspend or downgrade diplomatic relations with Venezuela, plunging the polarized country into a new period of flux.