Ira Glass

In that election, there was this massive grassroots effort not just to oust Maduro and elect the opposition candidate, but also they knew that they were going to have to prove that the opposition actually won.

And so what that meant is tens of thousands of volunteers around the country planned and trained for months.

And then on election day, they not only managed to get a huge turnout going out and voting, they also organized this whole thing where they went around and they collected paper copies of the vote totals from most of the voting centers around the country.

Okay, so they have these paper receipts.

They scanned these vote totals, added them up,

put everything online, proving that the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, beat Maduro and beat him decisively.

Their numbers showed a two-to-one victory.

People hated Maduro that much.

But election authorities declared Maduro the winner.

He stayed in power.

People protested.

Maduro cracked down with mass detentions.

Over 1,500 people

The United Nations looked into it and found that many of those detainees were tortured.

The world knew who won.

Countries around the world, including the United States, went through the opposition's numbers, looked at the receipts, concluded they were solid, and officially recognized Gonzalez, the opposition candidate, as the winner and rightful president of Venezuela.

But this past week, as you probably saw, when the United States captured President Maduro...

President Trump did not say, OK, here's the guy who actually won the election.

Here's the woman who leads the opposition that he's part of, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Karina Machado.

Let's finally put them in power.