A newly declassified CIA report says the Venezuelan government “could have” used voting machines to rig elections. President Donald Trump declassified a series of documents and reports related to election integrity on July 16, including a “CIA Note” entitled, “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting From 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities.”
The note says that between 2004 and 2020, “intelligence established that Venezuelan government officials developed sustained interest and likely some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems, including Smartmatic technology, to influence electoral outcomes in Venezuela.” The document says it was produced under the auspices of the CIA’s deputy director of analysis and is dated June 29, 2026.
The CIA produced a baseline assessment of Venezuela’s 2012 presidential election that maintained mass electronic election fraud had not occurred. A 2013 CIA “devil’s advocate” analysis, the note says, provided “plausible scenarios” in which “large-scale electronic manipulation could have occurred in Venezuela’s 2012 election without detection.”
The note summarizes sources reporting that, prior to the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s “intelligence services … worked with the National Electoral Council and Smartmatic to develop plans to manipulate election results using preprogrammed voting machines.” The source or sources of that reporting, however, are censored in the document released Thursday.
The note includes claims that such plans included sending “altered machines” to roughly 300 voting centers in pro-Chavez areas “to ensure victory by approximately 1.5 million votes.” Chavez won that election by roughly 1.6 million votes, according to the note.
“[S]ources reported that Chavez congratulated his team for successfully implementing the manipulation plan,” the report continues. The “devil’s advocate” analysis found that elections in countries that “are clients of the technology provider could be in doubt.” But the CIA assessed that such manipulation did not occur in the 2012 Venezuelan election, because the opposition party conceded loss, the CIA didn’t confirm these possibilities were acted upon, and pre-election polls showed Chavez in the lead.
Hellbound and Down 