Ira Glass
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. Act One of our show is called "Best Acta in a Dramatic Role." Nancy Updike has our story about Venezuela. Here she is.
Nancy Updike
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.
Ana Vanessa Herrero
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.
Nancy Updike
It was weird.
Ana Vanessa Herrero
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. But I never, ever could have prepared for them not giving the specific number for each candidate. That was the first time.
Nancy Updike
Did you say anything out loud, just alone in this hotel room?
Ana Vanessa Herrero
I said, I don't understand.
Nancy Updike
You said "I don't understand" out loud?
Ana Vanessa Herrero
In Spanish, it's OK, no entiendo. No entiendo. Because I didn't. I didn't understand. Like, I-- I didn't. I didn't understand.
Nancy Updike
The electoral council said they'd been hacked, but presented no credible evidence of the hack. All they would say is that President Nicolás 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.
Ana Vanessa Herrero
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 started walking for hours. 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. And he started walking with his these people. 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.
Nancy Updike
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 Seiscientos Kah, 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. 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. 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 Seiscientos Kah was created because we knew winning the election was not enough. We need the capacity to prove and demonstrate that we won the election. Some of the plan was carried out in secret. Other parts were done in plain sight.
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. It looks like one of those epic receipts from CVS or Rite Aid, but on special paper. 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. 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.
The 600k plan was each opposition witness would get their acta 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 acta. The QR code contains all the results from that voting machine, and the app would send those results to the opposition's national command.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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
[LAUGHS] [SPEAKING SPANISH]
Nancy Updike
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.
Interpreter
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.
Nancy Updike
Maria is 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, low fi part-- talking to other people inside a voting center.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
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-- where to tighten and where to stretch, like how to be flexible in the negotiation, being 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.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
So what happens if you don't get the acta? So all these scenarios would be played out in the first four hours of that training of like, OK, if you don't get the acta, this is what you put into place. First of all, what are they telling you? Oh, the machine wasn't working, or I can't get you the acta because of X reason. And at that moment, you would be like, OK, I can be friendly and have a communication.
But if I'm not getting the actas, I would tell the "Pedros," quote unquote, or someone like Pedro who's monitoring outside. I would say, hey, they don't want to bring us the actas. At that moment, they had their own strategy and training on how to mobilize, which would involve either bringing lawyers or journalists or very courageous people to be like, this is the law. We need to put pressure on getting the actas.
Nancy Updike
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, and Maria's training got into that specifically.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
And then we would act out different scenarios where we had to face the military-- in this case, the army-- how to be, on the one hand, very [SPANISH], very charming and very friendly. And we're in this for the right reasons. We're all citizens, and we're voting together.
And be on the same page 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'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.
Nancy Updike
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 6:00 AM. She and Pedro got to the voting center around 4:15 AM. 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.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
By law, they have to wait outside. Only the active witnesses are allowed inside. But at 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 running things, she was a chavista.
Nancy Updike
Chavista, meaning here a supporter of Maduro. Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chavez, so Chavista.
Interpreter
A very older woman who was very arbitrary, very not following the law. And this woman, me and my co-witness from the other table did a strategy where--
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
--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 mean or just 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, to the point that they were like, well, you're really complaining a lot. And she was like, I'm not complaining. I'm following the law. That was the whole point-- to fully understand the law and to be able to bring in the law in the moments where I saw that there was deviation from that election law.
Nancy Updike
Hurdle number two-- on this election day, Maria's voting center had only two tables, even though, in past elections, it's had more. Not only that--
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
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 five minutes or more. So it was just like the slowpoke table.
Nancy Updike
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.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
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 saying, [SPANISH] 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.
Nancy Updike
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.
Interpreter
And telling him, I need you to pay attention, and I need you to be on top of things. He directs himself toward me and says, senora, please stop talking to me that way. You can't talk to me that way. And then there was one point that it got so tense that he turned around and said--
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
--what you're going to cause with all your complaining is that we close down the voting center. And then I turned around and looked at him and said--
Maria
[SPANISH]
Interpreter
--then close it. For big issues, you need big remedies. You need to close it. And you know what? You will know that if you close it, it's on you, because you were not able to control the situation.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Nancy Updike
Maria, is it hard for you to be vocal like that, to stand up, or is that how you usually are?
Interpreter
So when you asked her, when you asked me, when you asked Maria, is this normal for you, she said--
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
--Pedro laughs because this is purely a part of who I am. I come from a very humble place and a place where if you don't have a voice and you don't speak up, you don't move ahead. But I will say that my [SPANISH], the other witness from the other table, she was scared for me. She was trying to tell me to calm down. She's like, oh, my god, they're going to close the centro because you're speaking up too much.
And I had to be very vocal and be like, [SPANISH], and they should close it. So speaking that way to a soldier is no small thing. But I felt like I had to, that it was my job. It was also good that I had my Pedro outside, and that allowed me to feel a certain confidence that I'm sure not every witness felt.
Nancy Updike
There's a fervor in the way Maria describes her own vigilance that day that might sound familiar to Americans, like another country's 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 at all. The politics in Venezuela don't really map onto a, "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.
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. 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. 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 acta, a summary of vote totals from the entire day. Actas look the same all over the country. 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.
Ira Glass
The last hurdle of the day-- and it's a big one-- after the break. Stay with us.
It's This American Life. I'm 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.
Nancy Updike
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.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
And only this bureaucrat person can handle the machine. So the one assigned to our voting booth was very-- she was very professional, very technical. She didn't have opinions-- doing her job.
So from 6:00 to 7:00 PM, 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. There's nothing to do. There's nothing to fight about. It's just the bureaucrat and the machine. So that takes, let's say, an hour or two. And then the aberration begins.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
Suddenly, 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.
Nancy Updike
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.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
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 [SPANISH], neighbor, she starts to get fired up after being tired.
And then the people outside start to demand a hand count, 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
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Nancy Updike
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.
Interpreter
The moment that the data is not transmitting, we all start to help the bureaucrat to find signals.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
So we moved the table from one side. We moved the table to the other side. We try to not touch the machine, but help her move the table to find the signal there, where 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.
Nancy Updike
Oh, my god.
[LAUGHTER]
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
Only living it can you fully understand it because it's just too loco. It's too crazy.
Nancy Updike
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.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
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. She's like-- I'm playing dumb a little. Sometimes I get a little bit lost, you know?
And here, I took out-- 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. [SPANISH] 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.
Nancy Updike
Finally, the data were transmitted and the results at Maria's voting center were official. It was a blowout.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
And we all looked at each other. The soldier--
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
--the bureaucrat, the chavistas-- all of us just looked at each other knowingly that--
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
--the opposition had won.
Maria
[LAUGHS] [SPEAKING SPANISH]
Interpreter
I finally get my acta. Really, it's a long paper, like a chorizo, like a sausage. You see all the numbers and all the data. But to be honest, I didn't even really have time to look at it closely because I handed it over like a relay race. It really felt like being part of a movie.
And so I give it to my [SPANISH], and my [SPANISH] rushes out of the door with it. I didn't even take a moment to process so much, because I was just so rushed to get the acta out into the public view. We didn't really know why we had to hand it over so quickly at the moment. We just did.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Nancy Updike
Maria's euphoria was short-lived. The electoral council, known as the CNE, made their announcement just after midnight, saying Maduro had won.
Interpreter
And then as I was leaving, my sister called, the one who I told you worries about me. And she said, look, I'm watching TV, and the CNE says that the results are different, that they're in. I immediately hung up on her.
Nancy Updike
Oh, wow.
Interpreter
I immediately hung up on her. I had done my job, and I was on such a high. And it was such a victorious moment for me that I just didn't want to feel like hearing that. I didn't want to feel defeated at that moment.
Maria
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Nancy Updike
On election night, Venezuelans uploaded videos recorded outside different voting centers all around the country. A similar scene repeated over and over-- 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 Guaira. There's a woman reading results from a piece of paper, shouting to the crowd, "Table two-- Edmundo, 303. Maduro, 194."
Woman
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
[CHEERING]
Nancy Updike
Table four-- Edmundo, 342. Maduro, 162.
Woman
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
[CHEERING]
Nancy Updike
Hundreds of these videos. The opposition website had actas from 83% of the voting machines in the country. The numbers showed the opposition had won 7.3 million votes. Maduro got 3.3 million.
According to these numbers, it was 2 to 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 show data down to the voting machine, they also showed that Maduro lost in lots of places he had won in the past.
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.
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.
As for the electoral council in Venezuela, the CNE, 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.
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.
After the election, there were mass detentions-- over 1,500 people, according to the Venezuelan human rights group, Foro Penal. 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, "opposition political leaders, individuals who simply participated in the protests, persons who sympathized with the opposition or criticized the government, journalists who covered the protests, lawyers for those detained, human rights defenders, and members of the academic community," end quote.
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."
The opposition candidate for president, Edmundo González Urrutia, fled Venezuela and got asylum in Spain. The leader of the opposition, Maria 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. An email we sent to the Ministry for Communication and Information came back with a reply saying our email had been blocked.
Nicolás 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. 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.
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 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. 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.
Ira Glass
Nancy Updike. Her story was produced by Anayansi Diaz Cortes. Anayansi was also the interpreter for Maria's interview. The story was edited by Laura Starecheski. Just this week, for the first time, President Biden started referring to the candidate whose 600k showed got the most votes, opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia, as the president-elect of Venezuela.
Coming up, an entire class of animals calls for a recount. They want an end to the lies about them. I mean, OK, I guess it's human beings who want the recount, not the animals themselves. But you get the idea. Anyway, that's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
