PRESIDENT Nicolas Maduro on Wednesday asked Venezuela’s high court to conduct an audit of the presidential election after opposition leaders disputed his claim of victory.

The request by Mr Maduro comes as Cuban authorities slammed outside interference in Venezuela’s affairs.

Mr Maduro told reporters that the United Socialist Party of Venezuela is also ready to show all the vote tally sheets from Sunday’s election.

“I throw myself before justice,” he said outside the Supreme Tribunal of Justice headquarters in the capital, Caracas, saying that he is “willing to be summoned, questioned, investigated.”

Mr Maduro insisted to reporters that there had been a plot against his government and that the electoral system was hacked. Asked later on during a news conference why electoral authorities have not released detailed vote counts, he said the National Electoral Council has come under attack, including cyber-attacks.

He said: “Engineers are fighting right now” to solve those attacks.

But the Carter Centre, which is alleged to have close ties to the United States State Department, criticised Mr Maduro’s audit request, saying the court would not provide an independent review and that there had been a “complete lack of transparency” in declaring Mr Maduro the winner. 

Mr Maduro’s main challenger, Edmundo Gonzalez, and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who are also alleged to have close ties to the US, say they obtained more than two-thirds of the tally sheets that each electronic voting machine printed after polls closed. 

Pressure has been building on the president since the election. The National Electoral Council has yet to release any results broken down by voting machine, which it did in past elections.

The Organisation of American States (OAS) came under fire from Cuba after it convened an extraordinary session on Wednesday, which failed to reach a consensus on a resolution to pressure Venezuelan authorities to “immediately” publish the detailed election results and verify them in the presence of international observers. 

The Cuban Foreign Ministry said that the OAS “lacks the moral or legal authority to resolve issues that only concern Venezuelans” and “considering the OAS’s long history of serving US imperialism.”

According to the Cubans, this history is characterised by “interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states in our region, support and promotion of coups d’etat, military dictatorships, repression and torture carried out by governments fully supported by the US. 

“There is no basis for an internal process such as the elections held in Venezuela to be analysed there.”