What were the specific discrepancies between opposition tally printouts and CNE official totals in Venezuela’s 2024 election?

1. What the opposition tally printouts showed: overwhelming González margins

Volunteer poll watchers and opposition organizers scanned and posted images of the individual polling-station tally receipts showing González with roughly 67% (or in some reports ~70%) of votes and Maduro around 30%, a gap of roughly 35–40 percentage points in the compiled actas that the opposition made searchable online ^{[1] [4] [5]}.

2. What the CNE officially announced: narrow Maduro win with few details

The CNE’s public announcement came as a short bulletin containing only a handful of aggregate figures and percentages, stating Maduro had won with roughly 51–52% of the vote and reporting González with roughly 43% (or 43–44% in some summaries), without publishing disaggregated polling‑station tallies or images of the actas that would reconcile machine-level counts with the national total ^{[5] [2] [6]}.

3. The concrete numerical discrepancy: machine-level vs bulletin totals

At the simplest numeric level, opposition actas indicated González roughly 67% to Maduro 30% (a Gonzalez lead of ~37 points), while the CNE bulletin reversed that picture to a Maduro lead of roughly 8–9 points (Maduro ~51–52% to González ~43%)—a swing of some 45–46 percentage points between the opposition’s precinct-level aggregation and the CNE’s aggregate bulletin ^{[1] [6] [7]}.

4. Coverage and access differences that magnified the dispute

The opposition reported having collected and published images for a large share of stations—figures cited range from about 73–84% (and some reporting of “more than 80%” or 83%)—but also said many actas were inaccessible because witnesses were blocked at certain centers or tallies were not printed in some places, while the CNE neither posted the acta images nor full machine-by-machine disaggregated results, hindering direct reconciliation ^{[3] [8] [7] [1]}.

5. Procedural claims, counterclaims and why reconciliation wasn’t possible

Observers including the Carter Center and Human Rights Watch flagged the CNE’s failure to publish precinct-level data as a “serious breach,” and international bodies urged release of the actas to verify totals; the government and the CNE countered with assertions such as a claimed cyberattack, and the Supreme Court later validated the CNE results—yet that validation occurred without publication of the actas the opposition had collected, leaving the numerical gulf unresolved in official channels ^{[9] [10] [11]}.

6. Secondary discrepancies: format, granularity and chain-of-custody questions

Beyond headline percentages, the conflict involved practical discrepancies: the opposition’s dataset included machine- and parish-level breakdowns and images that allowed independent tabulation, while the CNE offered only three vote figures and three percentages in its bulletin (for Maduro, González and “others”), meaning the CNE’s reporting lacked the granularity necessary to audit or explain differences between its aggregated totals and the scanned actas the opposition published ^{[5] [12]}.

7. What can’t be proven from available reporting

Open-source reporting establishes the existence and scale of the discrepancy and documents both the opposition’s published actas and the CNE’s sparse bulletin, but none of the sources provides an independently authenticated, complete national reconciliation that explains whether the differences arose from missing actas, transmission errors, alterations, or other causes; the technical audit details claimed by the CNE (for example, on alleged hacking) and any full CNE release of all actas are not substantiated in the materials provided here ^{[10] [9]}.