CARACAS, (Reuters) – Venezuela’s political opposition said yesterday it had collected the required number of valid signatures to begin a recall referendum against President Nicolas Maduro, amid the country’s economic crisis.
The painstaking process of validating the signatures began earlier this week. The electoral council has required that those who signed for a recall vote against the 53-year-old president return to polling stations to verify their signatures through fingerprint detection.
“We’ve achieved the goal,” said Carlos Ocariz, the opposition governor of a Caracas district. “We have more than 236,000 valid signatures.”
The electoral council had rejected more than a quarter of the nearly 2 million signatures collected by the opposition. It requires 200,000 signatures to begin the process. Once validated, the opposition must obtain 3.9 million signatures in just three days.
If the electoral council considers the signatures valid, it must call a referendum within 90 days. In order to push Maduro out, more than 7.5 million must vote against him – the number that voted for him in 2013, after the death of his predecessor Hugo Chavez.
