The United States will not recognize the result of Venezuela's presidential election which took place on Sunday, US Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan said.
For her part, US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that Venezuela's election was ‘illegitimate’.
‘The United States stands with democratic nations around the world in support of the Venezuelan people and their sovereign right to elect their representatives through free and fair elections,’ Nauert wrote on her Twitter account.
Voters in Venezuela went yesterday to the polls in an early presidential election, in which five candidates are competing, most notably incumbent President Nicolas Maduro.
Some 14,638 voting centers have been set up nationwide for Venezuela's more than 20.5 million eligible voters in the fifth presidential election since the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez arrived in office in 1998 and the second since his death in 2013.
The United States, the European Union and the Lima group, which is an alliance of 14 countries in the US and the Caribbean, refuse these elections and consider them neither democratic nor free.
Venezuela has been subjected to economic sanctions from the United States since 2013 in the era of US former President Barack Obama's administration.
The sanctions then were tightened under the current President Donald Trump in early 2017. The US also adopted for the first time financial sanctions against the Venezuelan government. (QNA)
