Ana Vanessa Herrero
speaker
191 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 3 Jan
Ana Vanessa Herrero’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Chavista meaning here a supporter of Maduro. Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chavez, so chavista.
Hurdle number two. On this election day, Maria's voting center had only two tables, even though in past elections it's had more.
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.
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.
Maria, is it hard for you to be vocal like that, to stand up? Or is that how you usually are?
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