Biden voices support for new elections in Venezuela

President Joe Biden said Thursday that he supports Venezuela holding new elections, following calls from regional leaders to redo a vote both the U.S. and others have said appeared to have been rigged in favor of the sitting president.

Asked by a reporter on the South Lawn of the White House if he agreed that the country should hold a re-vote, Biden said “I do.” U.S. officials have said previously that available data suggested opposition candidate Edmundo González had defeated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

But the White House quickly walked back Biden’s comments.

“The president was speaking to the absurdity of Maduro and his representatives not coming clean about the July 28 elections,” the National Security Council said in a statement. “It is abundantly clear to the majority of the Venezuelan people, the United States and a growing number of countries that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes on July 28.”

The NSC said the U.S. wants “the will of the Venezuelan people to be respected and for discussions to begin on a transition back to democratic norms.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on Caracas today to hold new elections that are fair and consistent with international standards. Both countries are regional interlocutors the administration has seen as critical in the effort to get Maduro to accept results that show he did not win the election.

Other countries in the region have gone further. Argentina has called González Venezuela’s president-elect and urged Maduro to step aside. The U.S. has not called González the outright winner nor referred to him as president-elect.

But the calls for new elections are the most dramatic show of regional force from the U.S. and partners in the region, as they seek to resolve a weeks-long stalemate in the South American country between the country’s socialist ruling party and an energized opposition movement.

The Venezuelan government proclaimed Maduro as the winner of the country’s July 28 elections the next day, publishing national-level results that claimed that Maduro eked out a narrow victory over González. But the Venezuelan opposition dismissed those results, arguing that precinct-level results, known as “actas,” that they collected from most of the country’s polling places showed that González had defeated Maduro by a two-to-one margin.

The opposition published their own version of the results online, which outlets including The Washington Post have verified are accurate.

The election has been widely condemned by international observers. The Carter Center said in a statement the election “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity at any of its stages and violated numerous provisions of its own national laws.” The United Nations issued a similar condemnation this week.

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked the phones in recent weeks, an effort to coordinate their responses with other countries in the region, namely Panama, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, so as to avoid past missteps in promoting democracy in Venezuela.

But the administration faced criticism from longtime Latin America hands and from Republicans for deferring to Brazil and Colombia. Earlier Thursday, 20 former U.S. officials wrote a letter to Blinken urging him to take a more forceful stance on the ongoing electoral standoff in Venezuela.

The former officials, among them four former U.S. ambassadors to Caracas, wrote in a letter posted to X that Maduro’s actions “strike at the heart of broader U.S. foreign policy interests in the region.” They added that “the diplomatic efforts of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are notable, but there is no substitute for U.S. leadership.”