The opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez had refused to testify about the publishing of voting tallies from the election.
Venezuela’s attorney general’s office has requested that an arrest warrant be issued for opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez over his refusal to respond to three summonses to testify about an opposition website that published detailed information about the country’s disputed presidential election.
The arrest warrant request for the 75-year-old Gonzalez from the Democratic Unity Roundtable, an electronic copy of which was viewed by The Epoch Times, comes as part of a probe into his claim that he was the rightful victor of the July presidential election, in which President Nicolas Maduro was declared by officials as the winner.
The accusations leveled against Gonzalez in the arrest warrant request include usurping official functions, forging public documents, instigating public disobedience, conspiracy against the state, and sabotage.
Venezuela’s national electoral authority and the country’s top court have both said that Maduro won based on a tabulation of a little more than half of the votes.
The opposition, which had been leading in the polls, disputed this, publishing their own voting records on the website. The records, which were based on ballot box-level vote tallies, showed a resounding victory for Gonzalez.
“We have in our hands the records that demonstrate our historic, categorical, and mathematically irreversible triumph,” Gonzalez said at a July 29 press conference announcing the tallies obtained by the opposition that challenge Maduro’s win.
Maria Corina Machado, leader of the Vente Venezuela party, said at the time that they had obtained more than 70 percent of the tallies, which show that Gonzalez won more than 6.2 million votes compared with Maduro’s 2.7 million or so. By the beginning of August, the opposition said it had obtained copies of voting tallies showing that it won with more than 7 million votes while Maduro received roughly 3.3 million, a result broadly in line with independent exit poll forecasts.
A number of countries have also cast doubt on Maduro’s victory, including the United States, several Latin American countries, and European Union member states, refusing to acknowledge his win without first seeing detailed voting results.
