A CIA report published by the White House on Thursday details actions that the socialist regime in Venezuela allegedly carried out to digitally rig their own country’s elections during the rule of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.
President Donald Trump addressed Americans on Thursday night to announce that his administration would declassify a tranche of files detailing major vulnerabilities in the United States’ electoral systems — including documents detailing the extensive efforts of the Chinese communist regime to interfere in American elections, notably, during the 2020 presidential election.
The documents, published by the White House on its website, include a CIA report detailing the actions carried out by the Venezuelan socialist regime to alter the results of elections in that country.
“Many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or change election results. Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot by the Maduro regime in Venezuela to do exactly that — conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020,” the White House said on its website.
“This reporting included precise details about methods the regime developed to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected even with an audit. This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own systems can never be hacked or compromised,” the text continued.
The June 29 CIA document, titled “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting from 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities,” contains a report on Venezuela’s intent and capabilities to manipulate voting machines, both domestically “and potentially in other countries.”
The report covers key findings from select intelligence documents created between 2004 and 2020 — years in which the Venezuelan regime, first led by Hugo Chávez and then by Nicolás Maduro, carried out about 20 different elections of questionable integrity such as referendums, presidential, legislative, and regional elections. Persistent concerns about the Venezuelan government’s manipulation of electronic voting systems and the potential national security implications for the U.S. election infrastructure were documented during that time period, according to the report.
The CIA claimed in the report that Chávez and Maduro “demonstrated sustained interest” in manipulating electoral outcomes through electronic voting systems — stressing that, in 2004, Chávez stated his objective was to “prevent the election of a sitting U.S. president.” The CIA claimed in the June report that it was the 2006 Intelligence Community’s assessment that election technology company Smartmatic’s ties to Venezuela allegedly posed a national security threat based on the Venezuelan regime’s “intent to influence U.S. politics and evidence of Venezuelan manipulation of their own electoral systems.”
The CIA asserted that Hugo Chávez’s intelligence services, including the still-existing General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) and Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN), allegedly worked with Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) and Smartmatic to “develop plans to manipulate election results using preprogrammed machines.”
Per the CIA report, the plans allegedly called for the deployment of “altered machines” to some 300 voting centers to “ensure victory by approximately 1.5 million votes.”
The CNE held a presidential election in Venezuela on October 7, 2012, in which Chávez sought to secure a third six-year term between 2013 and 2019. According to the CNE, Chávez defeated perennial “opposition” candidate Henrique Capriles Radonsky. However, the late dictator, who was last publicly seen in early December 2012, died of an undisclosed type of cancer in March 2013. Chávez’s death prompted a snap April 2013 election between his then-Vice President Nicolás Maduro and Capriles that resulted in the now-deposed socialist dictator’s narrow “victory.”
“Following the election, which Chavez won by approximately 1.6 million votes, sources reported that Chavez congratulated his team for successfully implementing the manipulation plan,” the CIA report read.
The CIA also made note of a 2013 alternative “Devil’s Advocacy” analysis, which outlined a plausible scenario for how large-scale electronic vote manipulation could have occurred in the 2012 Venezuelan election. If such manipulation occurred, the CIA wrote, “elections in Venezuela and other countries that are clients of the technology provider could be in doubt.”
However, the CIA noted, the baseline assessment maintained that “no large-scale electronic fraud” occurred in Venezuela in 2012, based on several factors, including, but not limited to, Henrique Capriles’ concession. Capriles also conceded the 2013 presidential election after weeks of intense protests in Venezuela — and, after initially supporting the protests, suggesting to his followers that they play salsa music during Maduro’s inauguration instead.
The report recounted that Smartmatic ceased its operations in Venezuela in 2018 after it accused the Maduro regime of inflating voter turnout results by over one million during the sham August 2017 election. At the time, the Venezuelan regime held a sham vote to elect a “National Constituent Assembly,” a supra-parliamentary body that hijacked the legislative functions of the Venezuelan parliament, at the time controlled by a majority of opposition lawmakers. Maduro then held a highly fraudulent presidential election in 2018, securing a new six-year term for himself until 2024.
“This represented a break between Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government after years of the company providing electoral technology to Venezuela,” the report read.
Smartmatic stated to CBS News on Thursday that it does not presently have any operations in Venezuela. The company told the broadcaster that while it worked in Venezuela for about 13 years starting in 2004, in affirmed that in 2017 “our technology helped prove that the government was reporting false turnout numbers, so we blew the whistle on them and stopped doing business there at that time.”
With regards to Venezuela’s sham December 2020 parliamentary elections, the CIA report states that Venezuela had developed “detailed technical plans” to manipulate the election. The report claims that the plans called for the creation of a second set of “virtual machines” that could replicate legitimate voting results, “then substitute manipulated data while making votes appear to originate from legitimate machines.”
The Venezuelan regime, at the time led by socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, held a sham parliamentary election in 2020 to stack the National Assembly with socialist loyalist majority — ousting what is still the last internationally recognized democratically elected entity in Venezuela at press time. By then, the ruling socialists had hijacked opposition parties, banned numerous politicians from running, and only allowed handpicked “opposition” lawmakers in the race.
In 2024, which was not covered by the CIA report, Maduro held a fraudulent presidential election seeking a third six-year term. He declared himself the “winner” of the election — yet, at press time, Venezuelan authorities are yet to comply with local laws and publish voter tallies and documentation that can corroborate the claimed “victory.”
At the time, María Corina Machado, the leader of the country’s only mainstream center-right party Vente Venezuela, led extensive grounds efforts to secure voter tallies on the day of the election that could demonstrate that Edmundo González, an elderly diplomat, defeated Maduro in the election. González was the only opposition candidate that Maduro allowed to run. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Machado with the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.