This video doesn’t show men stealing ballot boxes from Venezuelan voting sites, they’re AC units

A woman in the social media video can be heard using profanity in Spanish and talking about air conditioner units, giving the impression that the units are being taken without permission. 

PolitiFact couldn’t find this video’s origin, but some Facebook users commented that they had seen the video years ago, one said as far back as 2013. 

In Venezuela, votes are counted in two ways. One way is via a digital count that is sent to the electoral authorities through encrypted phone lines. The other way involves printed ballots; machines in a voting site print a ballot confirming a person’s vote, then that ballot is put in a box. The machines also print a tabulation with all the registered votes at the end of the election. 

The ballots and tabulations must match to confirm the results from each polling site, according to the Observatorio Electoral Venezolano, a Venezuela-based nongovernmental organization that monitors  and analyzes elections.

After the July 28 election, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Tokyo, expressed concerns that the Venezuelan election result "does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people."

"It’s critical that every vote be counted fairly and transparently, that election officials immediately share information with the opposition and independent observers without delay, and that the electoral authorities publish the detailed tabulation of votes. The international community is watching this very closely and will respond accordingly," Blinken told reporters July 29.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado claimed that the election results were fraudulent. (Edmundo González Urrutia replaced Machado as the opposition presidential candidate when the Maduro-controlled Supreme Tribunal of Justice banned Machado from running for any office for 15 years.)

"I mean this is not just another fraud, I mean this is grossly, grossly ignoring and violating popular sovereignty, there is no way they can explain and justify this, not with the information we have," Machado said, speaking in Spanish, July 29 to national and international media outlets.

Machado said the election results delivered by the Venezuelan government were "impossible," because they conflicted with the voting tabulations her team collected, which she said showed 6.2 million votes for González Urrutia and 2.8 million for Maduro. 

"We have in our hands the voting tabulations that demonstrate our historic, categorical and mathematically irreversible triumph," González Urrutia said, speaking in Spanish, July 29.

The New York Times reported July 28 that "officials at some polling places refused to release printouts verifying the electronic vote count, and there were reports of voter intimidation and other irregularities."

NBC News also reported July 29 about voter intimidation and irregularities at voting centers during the election.

Social media posts claim that a video shows "several masked men stormed a local voting station and stole the ballot boxes" during Venezuela’s 2024 election. 

But the video shows men carrying air conditioning units.

The Venezuelan opposition called the election results fraudulent and some news outlets have reported election irregularities at some voting sites. But this video doesn’t show stolen ballot boxes in Venezuela. We rate this claim False.