How do you count almost 12 million votes if you’re not the government? This week, we bring you the extraordinary story of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who created the only verifiable public record of votes in their presidential election — and other stories of people trying to correct the official record with their own versions. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Host Ira Glass sets us up for Nancy Updike’s insider account of the recent presidential election in Venezuela. The story is an incredible national drama that plays out in thousands of polling stations across the country, with regular people trying to ensure a fair vote count that everyone can agree on. (2 minutes)Act One: Producer Nancy Updike tells the story of the people of Venezuela trying to prove who won their recent presidential election beyond a shadow of a doubt. (22 minutes)Act Two: Host Ira Glass spent America’s presidential election in the swing state of Michigan, where he found very little dispute over the ballot count from Republican poll challengers in Detroit now that they are doing the counting themselves. (8 minutes)Act Three: This story is about a creepy and dangerous creature that does all kinds of terrible things. It’s also about someone trying to set the record straight on those exact assumptions about this notorious creature. (9 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.
Chapter 1: What happened in the recent Venezuelan presidential election?
There was another presidential election that happened recently in another country, and it was an astonishing one. And it has an aftermath that is ongoing. I don't know if you followed this very closely. I did not. President Nicolas Maduro was up for re-election in Venezuela in July. A lot was on the line in this election.
Their economy is in ruins, partly because of Maduro's policies, but made worse by U.S. sanctions. Millions of people have left the country. One in five people have emigrated.
Also, during Maduro's time as president, there's been an increase in government surveillance and government repression, arbitrary detentions of government opponents or perceived opponents, security forces arresting people or killing people during protests, as according to the United Nations and human rights groups. But every six years in Venezuela, there's a presidential election.
And the country does have a real political opposition. And the way they conduct their elections in Venezuela has all kinds of safeguards against election fraud. It's a system put in place by the socialist president, Hugo Chavez, because he didn't want there to be a shadow of a doubt. He wanted to prove to the world and to his opponents that he really had gotten the most votes every time.
Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center observes elections all around the globe, once said that out of dozens of elections that they'd monitored, Venezuelanism's election system was, quote, the best in the world. And this year, that got put to the test. When this brutal government went to the polls with the very real possibility that they might get voted out of office.
And the way it played out on the ground was this vast national drama and thousands of polling stations. Really, when you hear the details, it is remarkable what people did, hoping for a fair election. Today on our show, we have that story and also a couple of other stories of people trying to set the record straight against very great odds. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.
I'm Ira Glass. And let's just get to it. One of our shows is called Best Actor in a Dramatic Role. Nancy Updike has our story about Venezuela. Here she is.
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.
The electoral council proclaimed Maduro as the winner with only the percentages of the voting, not the actual numbers. of how many votes Maduro got. This is very irregular. We have never seen this before. It was weird. I was absolutely shocked. As a reporter covering Venezuela, I prepare for the worst, the most crazy things that you imagine. I prepare for that.
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Chapter 2: How did the opposition collect election data?
I said, I don't understand.
You said, I don't understand out loud.
In Spanish, okay, no entiendo. No entiendo. Because I didn't. I didn't understand. Like, I didn't. I didn't understand.
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.
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.
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.
The very next day, early in the morning, I opened my eyes to a country out in the streets, asking the government to count the votes, asking the government to give the country the numbers and show the numbers that they had. Here in Caracas, where I was, I interviewed so many people who were white.
who started walking for hours just, I spoke to this person just there standing, and I asked him where he was coming from, and he was coming from a neighborhood near La Guaira, 40 minutes by car. He started walking with his people just, and I asked him, where are you going? And he said, I don't know, but I'm not leaving until they show the results.
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.
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Chapter 3: What was the purpose of the 600K plan?
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.
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.
I'm so worried. I wasn't worried before, but I'm so worried now that I'm not giving you my real name. I'm not giving you Pedro's real name. I was worried enough to not want my kids to participate in the election or in any of these movements. In the end, they did participate, but now I'm very worried. And it's not my style to not give you my name, but here we are.
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.
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.
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.
But the witnesses' training focused on the most analog, lo-fi part, talking to other people inside a voting center.
The training was about how to negotiate and how to really communicate and create harmony with people that were going to be there representing the regime and that were going to have a certain disposition and just how to tighten and where to stretch, like how to be flexible in the negotiation process. being kind of in harmony with communication, but not being pulled into submission.
How to negotiate and how are we going to get what we need to get, which is the actas. That was my sole role. I was a witness at the table, trained in how to get what we needed to get, which is the actas. So what happens if you don't get the acta?
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Chapter 4: How did witnesses ensure a fair election process?
as citizens shoulder to shoulder, but with the brochure in our hand, knowing the law. We're not here to negotiate the law. We're here to be in this process together, but making sure that we are following the law. So at first, you know, you're very friendly and you're moving toward this, but they would train us.
If there's any deviation from what's stated in the brochure, then at that moment, you would take out your brochure and say, hey, amigo, we're not following the law in this particular case. Look here.
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.
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.
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.
By law, they have to wait outside. Only the active witnesses are allowed inside. But one point, the government side wanted their backup witnesses inside, but they weren't allowed. So it was like a little bit of a bickering fight because the woman who was kind of running... She was a chavista.
Chavista meaning here a supporter of Maduro. Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chavez, so chavista.
A very older woman who was very arbitrary, very kind of not following the law. And this woman, me and my co-witness from the other table, did a strategy where... She was good cop and I was bad cop. And the reason we did that was because my co-witness knew this woman from their neighborhood and from their life. So she couldn't be overtly kind of mean or just kind of overtly bad cop.
So my co-witness would be talking to her and be very friendly. And then I was kind of the complainer and I was actively complaining. You know, to the point that, you know, they were like, well, you're really complaining a lot. And she was like, I complain? I'm not complaining. I'm following the law.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did witnesses face on election day?
Not only that... The way they distribute amongst the two tables is by age. So this I had never seen before, that suddenly on one table they have everyone over 57. So why that matters is because suddenly, if you don't have people that are of mixed ages, suddenly one table, if everyone is over 57, the voting time goes from one minute to like five minutes or more.
So it was just like the slow poke table.
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.
Maria suspected that putting all the old people in one line was a deliberate attempt to slow the process and discourage people from voting.
You know, I could not actually intervene as a strategy in any way because my role was to be a witness. But what I could do and what I was doing, I was complaining and complaining and complaining. And, you know, saying, hurry up, hurry up. Oh, my God. These people, they put all the older adults here. We need to hurry up. But the strategy was to then...
tell all the pedros, all the monitors, or tell my pedro on the outside, this is what's happening. They put all the older people in one line. Please tell them to be patient.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: What was the outcome of the election for the opposition?
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.
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.
The last hurdle of the day, and it's a big one. After the break, stay with us. This is American Life from Ira Glass. We are in the middle of Nancy Updike's story about the Venezuelan election and the opposition's very elaborate attempt to get a real vote count. Nancy picks up where she left off.
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.
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.
And only this bureaucrat person can handle the machine. So the one assigned to our voting booth was very, you know, she was very professional, very technical. She didn't have opinions, doing her job. So from 6 to 7 p.m., basically the bureaucrat is in charge of the machine, right? So what that means is that everyone's tired. No one is fighting anymore. The tension is like, it's like a release.
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Chapter 7: How did the electoral council respond to the results?
There's nothing to do. There's nothing to fight about. It's just the bureaucrat and the machine working. So that takes, let's say, an hour or two. And then the aberration begins. Suddenly, you know, the bureaucrat is sitting there and it's like, oh, we can't transmit the data. It's the signal the machine can't process and transmit the data. It's the signal, it's the signal.
And then it's clear that the data isn't transmitting in many, many voting centers. And there are people outside of her voting center and others pressuring the members of the voting center.
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.
I'm standing next to her and she's trying and she's trying and she's trying and she can't get it to work. And then the soldier that I was fighting with, he starts to get tensed up. And then the Chavista, other person who's my compañera's neighbor, she starts to get fired up after being tired. And then the people outside start to demand a hand couch.
And then the tension starts to rise all over again with this bureaucrat person. basically saying, I can't transmit the result, I don't know what's happening, but I can't do it.
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.
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Chapter 8: What was the public reaction to the election results?
The moment that the data is not transmitting, we all start to help the bureaucrat to find signals So we move the table from one side, we move the table to the other side. We try to kind of not touch the machine, but help her move the table to find the signal there. We're all trying to help the bureaucrat find some kind of signal so that the machine can transmit the data.
She was trying to get signal like one would on their cell phone when there's no cell phone coverage, helping her find a solution to this issue.
Oh my God.
Only living it can you fully understand it because it's just too loco, it's too crazy.
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.
I went into robot mode because my role was to get the acta, the voting tally, the acta, the voting tally. So all I could think of was acta, acta, acta. I'm not leaving this place without an acta. And then even at one point I went up to the bureaucrat and I said, hey. you know, she's like playing dumb a little.
Sometimes I get a little bit lost, you know, and like here I took out, you know, here's the pamphlet and the brochure we were given with the law, here are the instructions. And then here it says that you're going to give me the voting tally, correct? You're going to give me the acta? And she said, of course, sí, sí, sí, claro, of course I am. And then I could relax.
But there were other people where they closed the voting center and even my Pedro went to another voting center where they completely closed it down at this point and refused to give people actas and people had to go mobilize and protest outside of the voting centers. Luckily, that was not the case in my voting center because I was like a robotic soldier next to this bureaucrat.
Finally, the data were transmitted and the results at Maria's voting center were official. It was a blowout.
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