The Trump administration revealed on Thursday a declassified document from the CIA that accuses the chavista regime of developing technical capabilities to manipulate electoral outcomes through electronic voting systems in the South American nation.
Trump cited Venezuela and its manipulation of the presidential elections since 2012 as an example to urge the approval of his proposal regarding the electoral system in the U.S.
The document, whose distribution was authorized this Thursday by the president, is dated June 29, 2026, and was declassified by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, on July 1.
This summarizes the intelligence gathered over 16 years regarding the supposed capabilities of the Venezuelan government to manipulate elections through electronic systems in the voting machines.
Among the most serious findings is a report prior to the Venezuelan presidential elections of 2012: intelligence sources indicated that the intelligence services of Hugo Chávez —the DGCIM and SEBIN— collaborated with the National Electoral Council and Smartmatic to deploy tampered machines in approximately 300 polling stations in pro-Chávez areas, with the aim of ensuring a victory by around 1.5 million votes.
Chávez won that election by approximately 1.6 million votes, and sources cited in the document reported that he congratulated his team for successfully implementing the plan.
The report also outlines plans from September 2020 to manipulate the National Assembly elections through a technique using virtual machines that would replicate legitimate results, replace real data with manipulated figures, and do so without leaving detectable traces in a conventional audit.
The technique involved replicating digital files sent to the central counting database, mimicking machines favorable to the ruling party, overwriting records of machines favorable to the opposition, and making the altered votes appear to originate from legitimate equipment.
The document itself clarifies its conclusions: the CIA's baseline assessment stated that there was no large-scale electronic fraud in 2012, relying on pre-election surveys and the concession of defeat by the opposition.
The report additionally states that directors of Smartmatic held credentials from Venezuelan intelligence services.
In 2006, the U.S. intelligence community had already classified Smartmatic's acquisition of Sequoia Voting Systems as a "moderate threat" to national security, which led the Committee on Foreign Investment to force the sale of the company in 2007.
In March 2018, Smartmatic ceased operations in Venezuela after publicly accusing the regime of Nicolás Maduro of inflating participation by more than a million votes in the Constituent Assembly of August 2017.
Alandete described the political conclusion of the report as "devastating": "the regime that Delcy Rodríguez is part of not only persecuted the opposition and controlled institutions, but also developed tools to manipulate the vote and perpetuate itself in power."
According to CNN, the documents do not prove that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was altered by foreign interference, and the CIA indicated that the internal access mechanism used in Venezuela would not apply to the electoral systems of the U.S.
The declassification comes amid intense pressure from Washington on Caracas: in October 2025, Trump authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela to put pressure on the regime, and in January 2026 dismissed the possibility of elections in the short term in the country.
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