848: The Official Unofficial Record
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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. But I've never, ever could have prepared... for them not giving the specific number for each candidate. That was the first time.
Did you say anything out loud just alone in this hotel room?
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What happened in the recent Venezuelan presidential election?
0:01–3:01
2
How did the opposition collect election data?
3:01–9:20
3
What was the purpose of the 600K plan?
9:20–14:10
4
How did witnesses ensure a fair election process?
14:10–17:26
5
What challenges did witnesses face on election day?
17:26–23:34
6
What was the outcome of the election for the opposition?
23:34–25:34
7
How did the electoral council respond to the results?
25:34–27:19
8
What was the public reaction to the election results?
27:19–1:00:31