In a historic feat, on July 28, 2024, more than seven million Venezuelans voted to elect democratic opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia — Maria Corina Machado’s Unitary Platform replacement — as the new president of Venezuela, rejecting 25 years of authoritarian rule by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela; PSUV), first headed by Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez and, since 2014, by dictator Nicolás Maduro.

With 83.5% of the votes tallied, González Urrutia won the election in a landslide with 67% of votes, while Maduro obtained only 30%. In order to be able to prove their victory in the face of the many abuses by the heavily militarized regime, Venezuelans mobilized across the country and gathered physical copies of voting tally sheets from over 83.5% of all polling stations (to which witnesses from all parties participating in the election were entitled by law), thus providing incontrovertible proof to the world that González Urrutia had secured more than two-thirds of the votes on election day.

Despite this overwhelming and clear expression of the electoral will of Venezuelans in favor of the democratic opposition, the regime-controlled electoral organ almost immediately declared Maduro the winner, falsely claiming he had won by “51.20% of the national vote” and failing to provide any proof that would provide credence to their claim. Instead, in order to impose its fraud and remain in power illegally, the Maduro regime has engaged in a brutal campaign of repression against thousands of human rights defenders, civil society leaders, and election-day volunteers, and a crackdown on democratic opposition leaders. Security forces have killed dozens of nonviolent demonstrators that took to the streets to claim their voices expressed in the ballot box be heard. The number of those arbitrarily arrested now exceeds 1,000 and is rising.

In response to the democratic opposition’s overwhelming election victory, the leading democracies around the world — including the United States, Canada, the European Union, and most democratic countries in Latin America — have recognized González Urrutia as the legitimate winner and denounced the overt electoral fraud the Maduro regime is attempting to impose. Many of them have already expressed that they recognize González Urrutia as the legitimate president of Venezuela.