Fraud allegations were rife late on Sunday in Venezuela, at the end of a presidential election as voters chose a successor to late president Hugo Chavez, their leader of 14 years, who died of cancer last month.
Venezuelans were choosing between the left-wing populist caretaker President Nicolas Maduro, 50, Chavez’s hand-picked successor, and Henrique Capriles, 40, the candidate of the unified opposition who lost to Chavez in a presidential election held six months ago.
Exit polls were not permitted, and no time had been set for the first preliminary official results, which were however expected late on Sunday.
Capriles warned of an alleged attempt “to change the will expressed by the people” at the polls.
“They are trying to vote in closed polling stations,” Capriles posted in the social network Twitter.
He demanded that electoral authorities formally declared the end of voting. Polling stations, which opened at 1030 GMT were to close 12 hours later, although if there were people in line to vote at that time they were allowed to cast their ballots.
“The government has become desperate. They are announcing results that do not exist,” Capriles wrote.
Maduro’s campaign command, in turn, slammed Capriles for such comments and stressed that they would acknowledge the results “whatever they are.” “If the anti-Chavez camp wins by one vote, we will concede defeat, but if we win by at least one vote, we will defend that lead with the people on the streets,” said Maduro’s campaign coordinator Jorge Rodriguez.
He called Maduro’s supporters to gather around the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas.
“We have a perfect electoral system,” Maduro had said earlier, after casting his ballot.
“I will not complain if I were to lose. But if I win, I win, even if it is by just one vote, and I will be president for the next six year,” he said.
Capriles said as he cast his ballot at a school in eastern Caracas that the opposition “will respect the will of the people”.
“Whatever the people say is sacred,” he said.
“Something good is happening and something good is going to happen in Venezuela,” he said.
High voting turnout
Both sides praised the high turnout. Two hours before polling stations were scheduled to close, 13.5 million people of the 18.9 million registered to vote had cast their ballots, according to the Maduro camp.
The opposition complained of a few irregularities in the actual voting process, but Electoral Council president Tibisay Lucena said there were only isolated incidents.
“The news is that there is no news,” Lucena said.
The winner of the election is set to be appointed with a six-year mandate, to complete the one that Chavez started in January.
Opinion polls ahead of the election pointed to Maduro as the frontrunner, although he appeared to be losing steam as the vote approached.
Almost 14,000 polling stations across the country with electronic voting were in place throughout.
A total of 3,435 local observers and 240 international observers were on hand to monitor the voting process, including former presidents Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Republic and Alvaro Colom of Guatemala.
Chavez beat Capriles with 55 per cent of the vote in a presidential election in October, but his health worsened from mid-December and he was never formally inaugurated for his new six-year term. He died at a Caracas hospital on March 5.
Venezuela is struggling with one of the world’s highest annual inflation rates – 27.6 per cent in 2012 – although its treasury can draw on an income of billions of dollars from the oil industry. The country is one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil.