Opposition disputes vote count in Venezuela elections

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela’s National Electoral Council says candidates for the ruling socialist party have won a majority of the 23 governors’ offices up for grabs in Sunday’s regional elections. Opposition leaders are disputing the vote count.

Pro-government electoral council president Tibisay Lucena says opposition candidates won just five of 22 races where the results are considered irreversible.

Projections by independent pollsters had predicted the opposition would win a majority of the governorships for the first time in nearly 20 years of socialist rule.

The election was being watched closely as an indicator of how much support President Nicolas Maduro and the socialist movement founded by his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, maintain amid soaring inflation and crippling food and medical shortages that continue to wreak havoc in Venezuelans’ daily lives.

Anti-government candidates were projected in polls to win more than half the races, but this success depended heavily on their ability to motivate disenchanted voters.

Voting got off to a relatively slow start in Miranda, the country’s second most populous state that surrounds the capital. Some polling centers were nearly empty in the morning, but voting appeared to pick up in the afternoon. Some people were still in line waiting to cast ballots after the official closing time.

The election comes during one of the most turbulent years in recent Venezuelan history. Four months of anti-government protests that began in April left at least 120 people dead. In August, the new pro-government constitutional assembly ruling with virtually unlimited powers was installed after a vote that opposition leaders refused to participate in and that the National Electoral Council was accused of manipulating.