CARACAS, Venezuela — Election officials on Thursday agreed to a request by Venezuela’s losing presidential candidate to conduct an expanded audit of the results from the recent election won by a protégé of Hugo Chávez.

The head of the National Electoral Council, Tibisay Lucena, who made the announcement, said that the audit would take a month to complete.

The Chávez protégé, Nicolás Maduro, who was declared the winner of Sunday’s election by a margin of less than 2 percentage points, is scheduled to be sworn in on Friday despite the decision to carry out the audit.