Venezuela's supreme court orders Electoral Council to submit audit report

Venezuela's Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) Friday ordered the National Electoral Council (NEC) to submit to the Constitutional Hall the audit results of the presidential elections held on April 14 which was won by President Nicolas Maduro. The SCJ said in a press release that the elections' audit results are necessary to support a decision on the challenge of the results made by the former opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, who rejected the elections' results. The SCJ's Constitutional Hall gave five days for the NEC to submit the report on the elections' audit. The NEC should also submit all the convenient instruments for the Constitutional Hall to take a decision about seven challenges presented by Capriles and the Venezuelan opposition. The audit process began on April 29 and finished on June 8. The audit was a petition of Capriles, who later rejected to participate in the process because the NEC did not include the inspection of the voting notebooks. The NEC declared Maduro as the winner with 7,587,532 votes (51. 61 percent) against 7,363,264 votes obtained by Capriles (49.12 percent), a tight difference of 1.49 percent. The NEC president Tibisay Lucena said "the Venezuelan electoral system is shielded against fraud", referring to the opposition's accusations. Lucena declared the audit included the inspection of 100 percent of the polling stations installed during the elections and said the results confirm the transparency of the process. Maduro replaced Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer last March 5 in Caracas. Chavez won the presidential elections held on Oct. 7, 2012, with a difference of more than one million votes against Capriles.