Venezuela presidential election: Organization of American States supports call for vote recount

The head of the Organization of American States has supported calls for an audit of the Venezuelan presidential election results.

“Regarding the need to carry out an audit and complete recount of the vote, Secretary General (Jose Miguel) Insulza expressed his support for this initiative and put at Venezuela’s disposal the OAS’ team of election experts,” the US-based OAS said in a statement.

The White House also stepped up on Monday to say that auditing the election was a necessary step.

"Given the tightness of the result — around 1 percent of the votes cast separate the candidates — the opposition candidate and at least one member of the electoral council have called for a 100 percent audit of the results," White House spokesman Jay Carney told a news briefing.

"This appears an important, prudent and necessary step to ensure that all Venezuelans have confidence in these results," he continued. "In our view rushing to a decision in these circumstances would be inconsistent with the expectations of Venezuelans for a clear and democratic outcome."

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Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles demanded a recount of votes cast in Sunday’s ballot after acting President Nicolas Maduro was declared the winner – albeit by a much narrower-than-expected margin.

Maduro, who replaced the late President Hugo Chavez after he died of cancer on March 5, garnered 50.66 percent of voter support over Capriles’ 49.07 percent.

GlobalPost's Venezuela correspondent, Girish Gupta, tweeted this map of the election results. 

The result was much tighter than October’s presidential race, which Chavez won comfortably by more than 10 percent.

Capriles said there were over 300,000 “incidents” that needed to be examined.

Nevertheless, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner and said the results were “irreversible.”