Ana Vanessa Herrero
Appearances
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Hurdle number two. On this election day, Maria's voting center had only two tables, even though in past elections it's had more.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Each vote requires a person's government-issued ID, their fingerprint, a choice on the voting machine, and a paper copy generated by the machine that the voter has to put in a box. So there are many points in the process where a person moving slowly can really gum things up.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Maria suspected that putting all the old people in one line was a deliberate attempt to slow the process and discourage people from voting.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Looking into this, I think it's likely this was just random chance that more older voters were concentrated at one voting machine. Voters are pre-assigned to specific voting machines long before election day. But Maria still believes it was a deliberate attempt to slow down and discourage voting. Everyone in Maria's account of this day she just refers to by their title, like they're in a play.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
First, the chavista. Next up, the soldier. There were actually three soldiers at the voting center. The soldiers are in voting centers, supposedly, to guard the voting process. Maria focused on the one in charge, prodding him if she saw anything that went against what was outlined in the election law pamphlet she was holding. All day she was on him, any small deviation from the official process.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
And she said in the middle of the day, she really got on his case because the line for the other voting machine stopped altogether. And she said it stayed stopped for more than two hours.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The night of the election, the results were announced a little after midnight on television. One of the people watching was Ana Vanessa Herrero, a reporter for The Washington Post. She'd been out covering the election all day. On election night, she was alone in a hotel room watching the results.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Maria, is it hard for you to be vocal like that, to stand up? Or is that how you usually are?
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
There's a fervor in the way Maria describes her own vigilance that day that might sound familiar to Americans, like in other countries' Stop the Steal movement, which also mobilized voters around the country to go to their voting center on Election Day with a copy of local election laws and their suspicion and their willingness to speak up. Venezuela's election was like that. And it wasn't.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
At all. The politics in Venezuela don't really map onto a sort of, well, who are the Republicans and who are the Democrats grid. The political party in power has the word socialist in its name, but mainly it's an authoritarian government. The opposition is a coalition that ranges in economic ideas from center-left to Margaret Thatcher. And it hasn't been in power for 25 years.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Venezuela's voting system is very different from ours. In the United States, each state has different rules and procedures for voting, different days and hours people are allowed to vote, different timelines for counting votes, different officials who certify results. In Venezuela, it's one system across the whole country.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
And one of the most important things they have is that for every vote, the voting machine produces a paper copy of the vote that the voter takes in hand and puts in a box at the voting center. And at the end of the day, about 30% of those boxes are randomly opened for a hand count of the paper ballots as a cross-check on the machine's count.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Witnesses watch this hand count, often not just the accredited witnesses. By law, anyone is allowed to watch the hand count in their voting center, as long as there's enough room. And then at the end of the day, there's the akta, a summary of vote totals from the entire day. Actas look the same all over the country.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
They are a recognizable and agreed-upon measure of voting results in Venezuela, each one with a unique identifier tying it to a specific voting center and voting machine. So Maria was at the voting center to keep an eye on the process, to complain, to make a fuss if she thought something was unfair or if the process was stalling out.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
But at the end of the voting day, if the law was followed, she would walk out not just with a bunch of stories about what looked fishy, but with the actual results in her hand, the acta. The ACTA isn't about suspicions and observations and complaints. It doesn't raise questions about who won. It answers them.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The last hurdle of the day came after voting closed. Maria calls the character in this part the bureaucrat, a woman from the electoral council who stepped in to deal with the voting machines. The machines finalize the numbers and transmit them to the electoral council.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The data are encrypted and sent through a dedicated wireless phone line that is just for the voting data and is only accessible through the voting machines.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The Electoral Council later blamed the interrupted transmission of voting results on a hack, the one they never provided credible evidence for. Maria, in her voting center, was watching the transmission problems in real time, standing next to the bureaucrat at the voting machine.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Maria said she couldn't get her copy of the ACTA until the machine transmitted the results. So this problem with the machine, this breakdown in transmission, led to a sort of slapstick routine inside her voting center.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Versions of this happened at other voting centers, including people moving the machines outside to see if they could get a signal there. Maria could only spend so much time on this table-moving craziness, though.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Finally, the data were transmitted and the results at Maria's voting center were official. It was a blowout.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Did you say anything out loud just alone in this hotel room?
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Maria's euphoria was short-lived. The electoral council, known as the CNAA, made their announcement just after midnight, saying Maduro had won.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
On election night, Venezuelans uploaded videos recorded outside different voting centers all around the country. A similar scene repeated over and over.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
One person in front of a crowd at night, reading the voting center's results out loud, sometimes holding the acta and using a cell phone light to read the tiny print straight from that, announcing totals for President Maduro and for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia. This is a video from La Huayra. There's a woman reading results from a piece of paper, shouting to the crowd.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Table 2. Edmundo, 303. Maduro, 194. Table 4. Edmundo, 342. Maduro, 162. Table 4.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The Electoral Council said they'd been hacked, but presented no credible evidence of the hack. All they would say is that President Nicolas Maduro had won with just over 51% of the vote. No vote totals, just the percentage. And the opposition, one hour after the electoral council's announcement, made their own live announcement on X. They said, actually, we won. And we can prove it.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The numbers showed the opposition had won 7.3 million votes. Maduro got 3.3 million. According to these numbers, it was 2-1 in favor of the opposition. Even if Maduro got every vote in the remaining 17% of the actas, he still couldn't win. And since the actas showed data down to the voting machine, they also showed that Maduro lost in lots of places he had won in the past.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
There was a frenzy of people after the election combing through the website with the actas and the vote totals. Were the numbers real? Were the actas real? The Washington Post looked into the website's data and concluded, yes, the actas were genuine and accurate. The Associated Press also concluded the actas' information was accurate.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Another website collected the videos people had uploaded reading the results on election night, geolocated them, and matched them to the actas from the voting center where they were from. Academics in Venezuela, Brazil, and the United States analyzed the website's actas and totals and concluded, yes, they're real.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
As for the Electoral Council in Venezuela, the CNAA, the website has been down almost continuously since the election. We reached someone there by phone when we asked for an email address to send questions. The person who answered the phone said, we don't do email. When we asked for a spokesperson we could contact to ask our questions, they said there isn't one at the moment.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Maduro has called the opposition effort to create their own vote tally, quote, a coup. The Electoral Council still hasn't published voting machine totals to back up their claim that Maduro won. It's as if what 600K did was so decisive, the government's not even bothering to argue the case and propose an alternate set of facts. Instead, in the absence of evidence, they're relying on force.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
After the election, there were mass detentions, over 1,500 people, according to the Venezuelan human rights group Foro Pino. The UN put out a report last month about the post-election detentions and violence. The report said people charged with terrorism and incitement to hatred after the election included, quote, End quote.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
A member of the UN fact-finding mission said in a statement that out of the people detained after the election, quote, many were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as well as sexual violence, which was perpetrated against women and girls, but also against men.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The opposition candidate for president, Edmundo González Urrutia, fled Venezuela and got asylum in Spain. The leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado, is in hiding. I sent an email asking about the UN report to multiple email addresses for the permanent mission of Venezuela to the UN and got no response.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
An email we sent to the Ministry for Communication and Information came back with a reply saying our email had been blocked. Nicolas Maduro is still the president, and in January, if nothing changes, he will take office for a third six-year term. To state the obvious, elections aren't democracy. They're not enough.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Venezuela's great voting system was created under Hugo Chavez after he was elected. And over the course of successive elections, Chavez ended presidential term limits. He consolidated control over the Supreme Court and the military. The legislature is no longer a check on presidential power. And now Maduro has all of that at his disposal as he tries to put the results of this election behind him.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
I asked people I talked to for this story, what is the value of this huge effort by the opposition to document the outcome of the election if it doesn't lead to political change? What does it mean to try and create the conditions for certainty about an electoral result and have that not carry the day? For some Venezuelans I talked to, it was simple.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Turned out tens of thousands of volunteers in the opposition had managed to collect paper copies of the vote totals from most of the voting centers in the country, down to the level of each voting machine. The opposition began publishing those results on a website that anyone, anywhere would be able to access. And overnight, the world became different.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
This effort showed that a majority of voters in this country want a change in government. And it showed the government pretending that's not true. What the opposition effort led to is a record. And from that record, a broad consensus about the election. Even among Venezuelans who may have very different ideas about the country's problems and solutions, its history, and its future.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
There is value in knowing whether the person who holds the most power in your country is there because a majority voted for him or in spite of the fact that a majority voted against him.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Ana's been reporting in Venezuela for 15 years. She's lived there all her life. And this election was not like others she's covered.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
I clued into this election after it happened, and I could not stop reading about it. This was a plan to document the country's entire voting record. It was extraordinary. The plan was called 600K, 600K. For the network of 600,000 people around the country, the opposition estimated they would need to be in place on election day. I wanted to see inside this election, inside the opposition's plan.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
I wanted to know how the opposition did what it did and how they did it so fast. In an era of chronic, virulent misinformation and mistrust, they pulled off a giant convincing. So I talked to an organizer of 600K. You won't hear his voice.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Police have been stopping people on the street, looking in their phones, to see if they've been to protests or have expressed doubt about the official election results. The organizer told me he went into hiding after the election. Now he's left the country. He said, Some of the plan was carried out in secret. Other parts were done in plain sight.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
600K was set up to work essentially like a giant relay race, and instead of a baton, people would hand off a piece of paper. Every voting machine in Venezuela prints out a long, narrow sheet of paper at the end of the voting day. Looks like one of those epic receipts from CVS or Rite Aid, but on special paper.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
And the receipt shows a tally of all the votes made on that specific machine for each candidate on election day. Those receipts, the voting tallies, are called in Spanish actas, A-C-T-A, acta. And the first runners in the relay race to get the acta in hand would be the witnesses. In Venezuela, each candidate is allowed, by law, to have an accredited witness at each voting machine in the country.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Not just in each voting center. At each voting machine. Over 30,000 machines. Some voting centers have only one machine. Some have more. The witnesses can't see people's votes. They just keep an eye on the process. And then at the end of the voting day, each witness is legally entitled to get a printed copy of the acta, the voting tally, from their voting machine.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The 600K plan was each opposition witness would get their akta and hand it off to someone else, the next person in the relay. That person opens an app the opposition created and then scans a QR code that's on the akta. The QR code contains all the results from that voting machine, and the app would send those results to the opposition's national command.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Then another person in the relay would take the acta, the physical sheet, to a secret location. There were over 100 in the country. Once the runner got to that place, they would hand the acta off to the person there, who had a whole setup. A laptop, a scanner, Starlink internet access, and a little generator. Like for camping, the organizer said.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
He said we needed electricity that can't be turned off and internet access that can't be blocked. The person with the scanner would run the ACTA through the scanner, and the image of the ACTA would be uploaded to the website the opposition had set up, where anyone could see it, along with the vote totals from that ACTA. Then the acta itself, the long piece of paper, would go into a box.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The box, when it was full, would be kept at another secret location. There were layers of support for each part of this relay all around the country, organized by state, city, parish, and voting center. The organizer said every process had a person responsible for it, with defined work and the tools to make it work.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
The organizer said even inside the plan, no more than 10 people knew all the parts of it. He said they mapped this out, 600K, based on lessons learned from counting votes in previous elections.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
And this time around, one thing that made a big difference was that for the first time in a national election, the ACTAs had this QR code, which meant if the opposition witnesses could just get the ACTAs, the full election results could go up on an opposition website right away. The whole operation depended on tens of thousands of witnesses each getting their acta no matter what.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
A process that seems to have required a combination of stamina, quick thinking, and strategic belligerence. Maria was a witness. Maria is not her real name, and this is not her real voice. We recorded someone else copying what Maria said as closely as possible so we wouldn't put her at risk of being identified. Maria and her husband, Pedro, also not his real name, both volunteered for 600K.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Maria's in her 50s. She was a social worker, worked for the government for years. She said she grew up without money. Maria was the first in her family to go to university. That's when she met Pedro, who was into politics.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
She and Pedro went all in on getting Hugo Chavez elected the first time he ran, because he promised changes that Maria and Pedro believed in— poor people getting access to university and health care and opportunities for a better life— They saw those changes happen, then over time saw them unraveling. Maduro, Chavez's successor, Maria said she never liked and never voted for him.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
In this election, she said she volunteered as a witness because she wants a different country for her kids, and she believes in the opposition. So Maria trained to be a witness with a bunch of mostly other women, she said. Some retired, like her, some lawyers, meeting in someone's living room. As an overall plan, 600K had so many technological aspects.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
But the witnesses' training focused on the most analog, lo-fi part, talking to other people inside a voting center.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Maria and other witnesses were being trained for, essentially, a mass act of civil obedience, following and insisting on the law. At the training, they got a pamphlet outlining election law and procedures that they would take with them on voting day and be prepared to wield as needed. For instance, in Venezuela, there are military personnel at every voting center on election day.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
And Maria's training got into that specifically.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
There are videos of witnesses in other parts of the country on Election Day who were locked out of their voting centers, reading the law out loud, saying, let us in. Some never got in. But Maria got in without problems. This is her account of her experiences on Voting Day. We've corroborated as much as we can without exposing her. Polls opened at 6 a.m.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
She and Pedro got to the voting center around 4.15 a.m. Pedro would stay outside the voting center all day, rallying voters, keeping the peace, and being Maria's liaison to the rest of the 600K network. Inside, there were two tables with voting machines. Maria was the opposition witness at one table, and she had an ally, the woman who was the opposition witness at the other table.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
From Maria's description, the two of them spent the day at their voting center playing tag team chess, a co-obstacle course. Hurdle number one. Maria's first argument with the other side was about how many witnesses would be allowed inside the voting center. Every accredited witness has two backup witnesses.
This American Life
848: The Official Unofficial Record
Chavista meaning here a supporter of Maduro. Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chavez, so chavista.