848: The Official Unofficial Record
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Don't search, match with, indeed, use indeed, for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster, get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs s more visibility at indeed dot com slash american terms and conditions apply, need, the higher you need indeed. There was another presidential election happened recently in another country. There was an standard shing one.

And IT has an aftermath that is ongoing. And if you followed this very closely, I did not. President Nicholas media was up for real election of Venus.

Well, I july, that was on the line in this election. The economies in ruins, partly because the door as policies, but made worse by U. S.

sanctions. Millions of people have left the country. One in five people have immigrated. Also, during major's time as president, been an increasing government surveilLance, repression, attention of government opponent or perceived opponent, security forces resting people are killing people during protest, is going to the united nations and human rights groups.

But every six years in Venus, well, there is a presidential election, and he does have a real political opposition in the way they conduct their elections in Venus, well, has all kinds of safeguards against elections, fraud, the system put in place by the socialist present 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, one said that out of dozens of elections that they are monitored, venezuelan elections system was, quote, the best in the world.

And this year, that upper to the test when this brutal government went to the polls. But the very real possibility that they might get of office, and the way paid out on the ground, was this vast national drama and thousand of police stations. Really, when you hear the details, that is remarkable.

What people did hoping for a fair election today? Or shall we have that story, and also a couple of other stories of people trying to set the record straight against very great adds from the U. B.

Easy chicago with this american life, america. A glass. And let's just go to IT.

I want to show is called best actor in a dramatic grow Nancy update. There's a story. But then as well, here he is.

The night of the election, the results were announced a little left midnight on television. One of the people watching was anainsa haro, a reporter for the washington post. She's been out covering the election all day. On election night, he was alone in a hotel room. M.

watching the results. The electoral council proclaimed mother was the winner with only the percentages of the voting, not the actual numbers of how many votes. Meta, god, this is very irregular. We have never seen this before.

IT was weird.

I was an absolutely shock as a reporter covering venezuela. Prepare for the worst, the the most crazy things that you imagine. I prepare for that, but i've never, ever had prepared for them, not giving the specific number for each candidate. That was the first time.

Did you say anything out loud or just alone in this hotel room?

I said, I don't understand.

You said I don't understand .

out loud in spanish. Okay, do because I didn't. I didn't understand, like I I didn't. I didn't understand the electoral .

council said they had been hacked, but presented no credible evidence of the hack. All they would say is that president Nicholas, as madeira, had won just over fifty one percent of the vote, no vote totals, just the percentage. And the opposition, one hour after the electoral councils 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, and the opposition had managed to collect paper copies of the vote totals from most of the voting centres 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. Ann has been reporting in venezia for fifteen years. He 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. Hearing that act as where I was, I inter viewed so many people who were who started walking for hours just um I I spoke to this person just they are standing and I asked him where where he was coming from he was coming from a neighbor od near wider forty minutes by car and he started walking with his people just and I and I asked where you're going and he said I don't know but i'm not leaving until they show the results.

I include 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 santos car, six hundred k for the network of six hundred thousand 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 plan.

I wanted to know how the opposition did what I 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 six hundred k you won't hear his voice. Police have been stopping people on the street looking in their phones to see if we've been to protests or have expressed doubt about the official election results.

The organizer told me and into hiding after the election. Now he left the country. He said, scientist cot 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 plane was Carried out in secret. Other parts were done in plain site. Six hundred k was set up to work, essentially like a giant, really 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, looks like one of those epic receipts from C, B, S, or ride, but on special paper, and the receipt shows atal of all the votes made on that specific machine for each candidate on election day. Those receipts, the voting tallies are called in spanish actors, A, C, T, A actor. And the first runners in the real race to get the actor in hand would be the witnesses in venetia.

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 thirty thousand machines. Some voting centres have only one machine.

Some have more. The witnesses can see people's votes. They just keep in on the process. And then at the end of the voting day, each witness is legally entitled to get a printed copy of the actor, the voting telly from their voting machine.

The six hundred k plan was each opposition witness would get their actor and handed off to someone else. The next person in the relay that person opens in APP, the opposition created and then scanned A Q R code that's on the actor. The Q R code contains all the results from that voting machine in the APP would send those results to the opposition's national command.

Then another person in the relay would take the actor the physical sheet to a secret location. They were over a hundred in the country. Once the runner got to that place, they would hand the actor off to the person there who had a whole set up, a laptop, a scanner, starlink internet access and a little generator like for camping, the organizer said.

He said we needed electricity, the camp turned off, and internet access that can be blocked. The person with the scanner would run the actor through the scanner, and the image of the actor would be uploaded to the website the opposition had set up, or anyone could see IT along with the boat totals from that actor. Then the actor itself, the long piece of paper would go into a box.

The backs, when I was full, would be kept at another secret location. There were layers of support for each part of this reay all around the country, organized by state, city, parish and voting center. The organizer er 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 ten people knew all the parts of IT. He said they mapped this out six hundred k 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 actors had this Q R code, which meant if the opposition witnesses could just get the actors, 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 actor, no matter what a process that seems to have require a combination of staminate quick thinking and strategic bullivant ance.

Maria .

maria is not A A real man, and this is not her real voice. We recorded someone else copying what marian said as closely as possible, so we wouldn't put at risk of being identified. Muria and her husband pedro, also not his real name, both volunteer for six hundred k 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 Better as 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.

Marias, in her fifties, he 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 he met pedro, who was into politics.

SHE in pedro went all in on getting hueco chavez elected the first time he ran because he promised changes that muria and pedros 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 unravelling. Medora chavez, a successor, marie, said he never liked and never vote IT for him in this election.

SHE said SHE volunteer as a witness because he wants a different country for her kids. And SHE believes in the opposition. So we are trained to be a witness with a bunch of mostly other women, he said. Some retired like her, some lawyers meeting in someone's living room as an over plan. Six hundred k had so many technological aspects, but the witnesses training focused on the most analog low file part, talking to other people inside voting center.

The training was about how to negotiate and how to really community and create harmony with people that were going to be there representing the regime. And we're gonna have a certain disposition and just how to a tighten and where to stretch, like how to be flexible in the negotiation, being kind of in harmony with communication but being pulled into submission. How to negotiate and how are we gonna get what we need to get, which is the actors?

That was my soul role, I was a witness at the table trained. And how to get what we needed to get, which is the act, assume sectors in once the notes. So what happens if you don't get the actors? So all these scenario would be played out in the first four hours of that training of, like, okay, if you don't get the actor, this is what you put into place.

First of all, what are they telling you, you know, oh, the machine wasn't working or I can actually the act of because of x reason and at that moment you would be like, okay, I can be friendly and have a communication, but if I am not getting the actors, I would tell the baths put on code, or someone like bathrobe who's monitoring outside, I would say, hate. They don't want to bring us the actors at that moment. They had their own strategy and training on mobilize, which would involve either bringing lawyers or journalists are very courageous people to be like this is the law. We need to be pressure on getting the .

access 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 ve got a pamphlet outlining election law and procedures that they would take with them on voting day and be prepared to real as needed. For instance, in venezia a there are military personnel at every voting center on election day, and we is training, got into that specifically .

act different scenario where like we had to face the military, in this case the army. How to be, on the one hand, very hook, a very charming and very, you know like friendly. And you know, we're in this for the right reasons, raw citizens.

And we're voting together and kind of beyond the same page as citizens, shoulder to shoulder, but with the broken 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 is any deviation from what stated the brochure.

Then at that moment, you would take out your brochure and say, hey, I ego. We're not following the law in this particular place. Look here.

their videos of witnesses in other parts of the country on election day who were locked out of their voting centres 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 caborn as much as we can without exposing her polls. Opened its six A M SHE in. Pedro got the boating centre around fourth fifteen A M.

Pedro would stay outside the voting center all day, rAiling voters, keeping the peace and being marias liason to the rest of the six hundred cane network. Inside there were two tables with voting machines. Maria was the opposition witness at one table, and he had an ally, the woman who was the opposition witness at the other table.

From mario 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 is about how many witnesses would be allowed inside the voting center. Every accredited witness has two back up witnesses by law.

They have to wait outside. Only the active witnesses are allowed inside. But one point, the government side wanted their back of witnesses inside, but they weren't allowed. So I was like a little bit of a biggert fight, because the woman who was kind of running things, he was um a chavez star to be stop.

meaning here a supporter of material medora is the successor to hugo chavez. So to vista.

a very older woman who was very arbitrary, very kind of not following the law. And this woman um mean in my co witness from the other table to the strategy where he was good cop and I was bad cop in the reason did that was because my co witness knew this woman from their neighborhood and from from their life so SHE couldn't be overly kind of mean or just kind overly bad up.

So my co witness would be talking to her be very friendly and then I was kind of the complainer and I was actively complaining. You know, to the point fit, you know they were like while you're really complaining along SHE was like I complaining. 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.

Hurdle number two, on this election day, muriel's voting centre had only two tables, even though in past elections .

IT had more. Only that they distribute among the two tables is by so this I had never seen before, that suddenly on one table they have everyone over over fifty seven. So why that matters is because suddenly, if you don't have people that are mistakes, suddenly one table, because if ever is over fifty seven, the voting time goes from one minutes to, like, five minutes or more. So I was just like the slow poke table.

Each vote requires a person's government issued idea, their fingerprint, a choice on the voting machine, and a paper copy generated by the machine that the voter has to put in the box. So there are many points in the process where a person moving slowly can really dumb things up. Maria expected that putting all the old people in one line was a deliberate attempt to slow the process and .

discourage people from voting. I not actually intervene as a strategy in any way, because my role was to be a witness. But I, what I could do and what I was doing, I was complaining and complaining and complaining.

And, you know, I put that, I put A A, 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 bathers, all the monitors, or tell my bether 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 boating machine. Voters are prey signed to specific voting machines long before election day. But mario 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 buy their title like they're to play. First, the chavez a. Next up, the soldier.

There are actually three soldiers of the voting center. The soldiers are in voting center, supposedly to guard the voting process. Maria focused on the went in charge, proud him if he saw anything that went against what was outlined in the election law.

pm. SHE was holding all day. He was on him any small deviation from the official process. And he said in the middle, the day SHE really gone on his case, because the line for the other voting machine stopped altogether. And he said IT stayed stopped for more than two hours and.

you know, telling him, I need you to pay attention and I need you to be on top of things. He direct himself toward me and says, and, you know, please stop talking to me that way. You can talk to me that way.

And then there was one point that I got, so he turned around. And what you're going to cause with all you're complaining is that we closed down the voting center. And then I turned around and look at him and said, then close IT you you for big issues, you need big remedies. You need to close IT. And you know what, you will know that you close IT it's on you because you were not able to control the situation.

Mura is IT hard for you to be vocal like that to stand up, or is that how you usually are?

So when you ask her, when you asked me, when you ask the maria, is this story for you? He said, Better laughs, because this is purely a part of who I am. I come from a very humble place in a place we're like, if you don't have a voice and you don't speak up, you don't move ahead.

But I will say that my combine eat the other witness from the other table, SHE was scared for me. He was trying to tell me to calm down. She's like, oh god, there's gonna close the same throw because you're speaking up too much and you know, I had to be very welcome.

Be like kalo sia, and they should close IT. So speaking, that way to a soldier is no small thing. But I felt like I had to, that I was my job IT was also good, that I had my father's outside and that he was, you know, that allowed me to feel certain confidence that i'm sure not not every witness felt there's .

a further in the way maria describes her own vigiLance that day that might sound familiar to americans, like in other countries. Stop the steel movement, which also mobilized voters around the country to go to the voting center on election day with a copy of local election laws and their suspicion and their willingness to speak up. Venezuelan election was like that, and IT wasn't at all the politics in venezia.

A don't really map onto a sort of, 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. Margret thatcher and IT hasn't been in power for twenty five years.

Venezuela voting system is very different from hours 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 benezra. 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 thirty percent of those boxes are randomly opened for a hand count of the paper ballots as a cross check on the machines count. Witnesses watch this hand count, often not just the accredited witnesses by law, anyone is love to watch the hand count in their voting center as long there's in a room.

And then the end of the day, there's the actor. A summary of vote totals from the entire day. Actors looked the same all over the country. They are a recognizable and agree upon measure of voting results in each one, with a unique identifier tying IT to a specific voting center and voting machine.

So maria was at the voting centre to keep an eye on the process, to complain, to make a fuss if he 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 actor, the actor isn't about suspicions and observations and complaints. IT doesn't raise questions about who won. IT answers them.

The last heard all of the day, and it's a big one after the break. Support for this podcast and the following message come from energy a where everyone can invest in the world's most profitable renewable energy markets. Since inception, energia has helped investors realized at twelve percent return while earning steady monthly dividends.

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the risk of loss. Through line is a podcast where we tell stories about a place crowded in mystery, the past. And to really understand that, we take you there, something happened to our collective psyche after the atoms bomb.

Listen to hear us, reopen stories from the past and find clues to the present on the line. The history podcast from N. P. R. This american life, my glass, we are in middle of Nancy update story about the Venus well on election and the opposition's very elaborate attempt to get a real vote count. Nancy picks up where you left off.

The last hurdle of the day came after voting closed. He calls the character in this part the bureau at a woman from the electoral council who stepped in to deal with the voting machines. The machines finalize the numbers and transmitted them to the electoral council. The data are encysted 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 bureau at person can handle the machine. So the one assigned to our voting booth was very SHE, is very professional, very technical, shouldn't have opinions, doing her job. So from sixty seven pm, basically the bureaucrat is in charge of the machine, right? So what that means is that everyone's tired.

No one is fighting. Any more attention is like it's like a release. There's nothing to do.

There's nothing to fight about is just the bureau t and the machine. So that takes less an hour to and then the abortion begin. That is this could means I will assume this be.

Suddenly your car is sitting there and it's like, oh, we transmit the data, the signal, the machine can process and transmitted the data. It's the signal to the signal. And then it's clear that the data is in transmitting in many, many voting centers. And there are people outside of her voting center and others pushing 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 to. And then the chav, other person whose my companion as neighbor, he starts to get fired up after being tired.

And then the people, wild des, started to demand a hand count. And then the tension starts to rise all over again, with the spirit rap person basically saying, I can transmit the result. I don't know what's happening, but I can do IT. Mary said he couldn't .

get her copy of the actor 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 centre.

The moment that the data is not transmitting, we all start to help the bureaucrat to find signals from side to kind of not touched the machine, but help her move the table to find the signal there. You know, we're all trying to help the bur crat find some kind of signal so that the machine can transmit the data. SHE was trying to get signal like one wood on their cell phone when there is no cell on phone coverage, helping her find a solution to this issue.

Oh my god.

See early, understand IT because it's just too local. 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. I could only spend so much time on this table .

moving in craziness, though. 就 这 不， i went into robot mode because my role was to get the actor the voting telly, the actor the voting telly. 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 beer kind. I said, hey, you know, she's like that playing dum a little.

Sometimes I get a little bit loss, you know. And like here, I took out, you know, here's the panel in the brochure we were given with the law here in the instructions. And then here IT says that you're going to give me the voting telly, or right, you're going to give me the acta.

And he said, of course, c cattle course I M and then I could relax. But there were other people where they closed the voting center, and even my Better went to another voting center where they completely closed IT down at this point, and refuse to give people act dozen people to go mobilize and protest outside of the voting centers locally. That was not the case in my voting center because I was like a robotic soldier next to the pier.

Finally, the data were transmitted, and the results in marriage voting centre were official, was blow out.

We all looked at each other, the soldier, the chavez, each other position had one.

Paper like like a sausage. You see all the numbers and all the data. But to be honest, setting even really have time to look at IT closely because I handed IT over like kind of like a real race.

I really felt like being part of a movie. And so I give you to my coma and my ba rush out of the door with IT. I didn't even take a moment of process so much because I was just so rush to get the act that out into the public view. We didn't really know why we had to hand IT over so quickly at the moment we did.

Maria's euphoria was short lived. The electoral council, known as the site N A, A, made their announcement just after midnight, saying muro had one.

And then as I was leaving, my sister caught the one who I told you worries about me. And SHE said, look on watching T. V. And the senate has that the results different that they're in. I immediately hung up on her, oh, well, I immediately hung up on her I had on my job and I was on such a high and I was such a Victorious moment for me that I just didn't want to feel like hearing defeated at home.

On election night, venezuelans uploaded videos recorded outside different voting centres all around the country, a similar scene repeated over and over one person in front of a crowd at night reading the voting centers results out loud, sometimes holding the actor in using a cell phone like to read the tiny print straight from that, announcing totals for president medora and for the opposition candidate at moondog zala a otia. This is a video from the via. There's a woman reading results from a piece of paper shouting to the crowd table two at mondoldo hundred three meo one hundred ninety four.

Table four at mondo three hundred forty two model one hundred sixty two.

Hundreds of these videos, the opposition website had actors from eighty three percent of the voting machines in the country. The numbers showed the opposition had won seven point three million votes. Madero got three point three million.

According to these numbers, IT was two to one in favour of the opposition. Even if moderna got every vote in the remaining seventeen percent of the actors, he still couldn't win. And since the actors shows data down to the voting machine, they also showed the majora lost in lots of places he had won in the past.

There was a frenzy of people after the election coming through the website with the actors and the boat totals, where the numbers real, where the actors real. The washington post looked into the websites data and concluded, guess the actors were genuine and accurate. The associated press also concluded the actors information was accurate.

Another website collected the videos people had uploaded, reading the results on election night. G, O, located them and matched them to the actors from the voting center where they were from. Academics in venezuela, brazil and the united states analyzed the websites, actors and totals and concluded, yes, they're real.

After the electoral council in venezuela, the C. N. N. A. The website has been down almost continuously since the election. We reach 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 ask for a spokesperson, we could contact to ask our questions. They said, there isn't one at the moment.

Majora has called the opposition effort to create their own vote li a cool. The electoral council still hasn't published voting machine totals to back up their claim that medora won. IT is if what six hundred k did was so decisive, the government are 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 intensions over fifteen hundred people. According to the venecuela human rights group for open el, the U. N. Put out a report last month about the post election detention ons in 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 sympathised with the opposition or criticize the government, journalists who cover the protests, lawyers for those detained human rights defenders and members of the academic community and quote, a member of the U. N. Fact training mission said in a statement that out of the people detained after the election, quote, many were subjected torture, another 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 at monogusa uta, fled venezuela in got asylum in spain. The leader of the opposition, maria korea method, is in hiding as intent. Email asking about the U.

N. Report to multiple email addresses for the permanent mission of venezuela to the u. 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.

Nico's model u is still the president in 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 screaming court and the military. The legislature is no longer to check on presidential power. And now madeira has all of that at his disposal as he tries to put the results of the selection behind him.

I asked people I talk 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 that mean to try and create the conditions for certainty about an electoral result and have that not Carry the day for some venez? Williams I talk to IT was simple.

This effort showed that majority of voters in this country want a change in government. And IT showed the government pretending that is not true. What the opposition effort LED to is a record, and from that record abroad, consensus about the election, even among venezuela, and who may have very different ideas about the country's problems and solutions, its history in its future, there is value in knowing with the person who holds the most power in your country. Is there because the majority voted for him, or in spite of the fact that a majority voted against him?

Nancy hack, her story was produced by anian C D S Q tez, ana say, was also the interpreter from reas interview. This resented by gr cheskin. Just this week, the first time present, biden started referred to the candidates who six hundred k showed got the most votes opposition later at mondo genzano uta as the president of Venus wala, coming up an entire classic of animals caused for a recount.

They want to end to the lives about them. I am okay. I guess it's huber being. So want to account at the animals themselves, but you get the idea anyway, that's minute. When our program continues.

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We've reacted to our show like to meanwhile in amErica that this is an interesting sign of the times he started in very familiar scene, and they went into a direction I did not expect. IT happened on election night, the coworkers, so we chase. And I, when michigan, in separate locations, he was late, but nobody knew yet who was going to win. And so he was that what would later become the trump Victory party in michigan? And SHE ambled up, decent people SHE talked to in the past for a public connectivity.

including tod gillman talking about, he is gna happen and destroy.

Are you serious?

Just gonna have what to do in the morning. Alright, in a report of a truck with california police, show up, G, C, F, center.

I don't know. You catch that. He said the sheet is gonna en at two in the morning, and that a truck with california plates shut up at the vengence tenner, where they were at that very moment counting abcd ballots for detroit online. There was a video with three supposed sed culprits Carrying suspicious packages into some building that i've in pm.

Post, post on twitter.

I gotta tell ira because he's down there. He's watching for the steel to coming.

Yeah, I tell that the word has on a truck with show up. But why? Why is a structure on up this time at night?

All about that should be there already. This took quick camera cut to the convention center. nice. Oh.

good music too. Okay.

so i'm there in the convention center that night with hundreds of the very tired looking people, not exactly watching the still common, but with someone who was on high alt for any possible vote, stealing snags one of the lead republic and poll challis.

The convention center, a guy named jeff, shaped so so he told me, which is, just heard that mysterious ballots arriving at the convention center, seven pm, and the truck with call on your plates. And this next moment, the one where I told jeff about IT is the moment that I thought was so interesting. And to get IT significance, as you told you first, that jeff shapers is a serious selection skeptic.

C, back in twenty twenty, he was one of hundreds of people who rushed this very spot. Detroit convention center, certain the democrat were hear stealing the election for joe biden, may remember the crowds detroit to stop the count. OK so that our jeff was back in a republican ed investigation in the state senate later found no fraud, no harm to the vote counting to try. But jeff is still convinced this day the democrat in there throwing illegal ballots into the system.

Now you got to understand that in twenty, twenty lot of ballots were put out into the public. So they had a store of ballot progressives that they could use use for fraud.

He means that .

is what I understand, and that is what I believe just started .

to work on election step full time after that because the number two person and an activist group called michigan fair elections, that is all sort of lawsuits and electronic oring and public education. That's how we ended up on election night. Twenty twenty four is one of the weed republic and election chAllenges in detroit, the location of mission.

And I think this is fair to say that republicans were most suspicious about for I retired. Jeff was a system guy in the auto industry, got the air of a very sincere dad, patiently helping you with your homework. You also likes a good tag on educate.

investigate little gate .

that came up in a bunched story.

He told me my goal again, remember, investigate, educate and A D. V. litigation.

That's jeff. And here's the moment that thought was interesting when I told jeff breaking ing news about the trucks of caliphs your plates at seven pm. This election skeptic.

what's not having IT how to say this if you don't know process you see empty in yell. You know that what that is and looking at IT, that looks like it's an election board.

He doesn't know that eleven P M is when you would expect about to shop at the convention center. And there's so we suppose a boat stealers in the video posted on x to Carrying a Whiteboard, red bag and other box.

You see these White boxes, okay, that's a tabulate. Or inside, okay, you see those gray metal boxes, those have the baLance to him and then they have the poll book, which is an red sealed bag. And that's Normal process IT.

Is anything that that that you activists have become such experts that you're correcting misinformation that other people are putting out now?

Well, back in twenty twenty one, we did know squat, and we was the process of learning. We learned, we should say.

for other factual information that I saw jeff give out an election night grap do also spread information that does not seem as credible. Like, for example, the area that michigan's voter roles, which, like other states, have a lot of inactive voters on them, a real problem that might be used for widespread fraud, which you can secretary of state disputes that. And I talked about IT, neither commerce.

the other.

On the action day, jeff in the other republic can pull chAllenges that I talk to. They were pretty happy with what they were seeing throughout the day. They all said the same thing to me.

They are detroit. IT adjusted a few procedural things in handling baLance since twenty, twenty. And those fixes were working.

Ballots were counted in batches of fifty by small teams. Nobody moved on. There was agreement about each batch was a good clean account.

I can say, is what i've witnessed. The voting process has been orderly organized in valid and what's the mood inside .

between the democratic and republican vote watchers calm .

and cordial yeah I mean, there's there's not much argue about. There has been very few needs for a judici.

a judici to sea dispute. Jeff is involved in those because he's one of the lead republican chAllengers, he says in eight days of counting.

i've seen the judiciary may be. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen times.

fifteen times are so out of how many votes is that .

seventy eight thousand processed?

If Harris wins, say, in Michael, would you believe the result?

Yes, I would. Based on what i've seen here.

that is a really remarkable change that in twenty twenty and you're saying you don't believe the result. And you're saying this time around, even if Harris wins, you're in kind to think that you're going to believe the result.

That's right. I do. Yes.

another republican said this to me throughout the day well before the results came in. And to be honest, I am nature. I believe they all would have stuck by that.

The paris one after last time. This seems like nothing happened that throw an election. Many court cases in a bipartisan state senate investigation found no evidence of a steel, but they found all kinds of evidence and continue to believe IT.

But this time done point, and the election doubters had been pretty quiet late the evening, I guess, was the early morning after became quite that michigan, an in the rest of the swing states, were going to go for trump. I asked jeff if he felt this was partly his doing, like his years of work on election monitor. They paid off in an election that he could trust. Do you feel a sense of Victory.

not Victory? Satisfaction, satisfaction. And the the job is not done.

Tomorrow we go back, we start working on the voter roles that are bloated. Our work is not finished. You this is a satisfying moment. It's just like a football game or a basketball game. You have one day to enjoy IT and you prepare for the next game.

This is not going away. The dots about elections in our country, the scrutinising and arguing over them is interesting. In the wake of trumps of very solid Victory, that was mostly the democratic on social media one day if the election is done.

I wasn't in tone of that. There was a tiny whisper of a compound compared to the non stop multi media barge of videos and charts. We got ten, twenty, twenty from republicans. But if the election had been more of a real squeaker and Harris lost, I bet we won't hurt a lot more of that. IT is easy to see the appeal, but that kind of help.

Three, I want to handle web. We wave. Okay, a quick get up before we start this next story that IT mentions a part of the male anatomy take under advisement. Pro and kn is what you want to do.

IT is not what the stories about, stories about a creepy and dangerous creature, that is all kinds of terrible things, so so about somebody takes issue with every word that I just said about that creature. And they want to a recount. They want to reconsideration. They want is off to examine the facts and stop believing the fake news about this creature always been met up with this person to hear her out.

This person is my friend, healthy budget. And if you're run into her at a dinner party or a bar, maybe you happen to be standing behind her in the security line at the airport. SHE might ask you this.

what do you know about black water spiders? What do you know?

Okay, I know that they're very poisonous, like they have really bad, but like a bite can kill you. And and I know that the female after meeting, like, kills the mail and eat him.

fantastic. That is exactly what most people know about black water spiders. And you're totally wrong.

And this is called his mission to expose the lies about the spider being a one ten, correct the record and restore her good name. Kelly used to work as a park ranger in new york, by the way, he also used to report science stories. And over the years she's a massed in a absurd amount of information about these spiders.

So let me, let me tell you, i'll start with the the black doo name, the idea that the black widow eats her husband or the spider they just made IT with that SHE you know is a as a murderer dressed all in black um morning a husband that they just killed calls.

says the female the mail okay, this has happened but very rarely, and it's barely unnoticeable trade. If you look around of what .

the rest of spiders are doing, many species of baby spiders, which are called spider lings um often eat their siblings right after her hatching, and some species of spiderling even eat their own mother after hatching.

H and sexual cannibal ism, which is like eating your mate after he has done the deed with you, is very common in the spider world ah but you know who's who's not common that much for is black what to spiders? They only do this in captivity. It's practically never been seen in the wild, in the northern hemisphere.

Meanwhile, the male spider, he's no mister Rogers, check out what he does.

So the male black widow will sometimes go around to the the females web and sort of clip off little parts of IT so that he has no exit routes, and then he will go up next to her and like calmly, like sort of arrest her. And then he throws a web of his own over her to then copy late with her. Oh, and the scientists have called that web the bridal veil, which is so not what that should be called. Are you serious?

Oh my.

this IT strikes me as a very weird behavior. And if I were a person naming spiders and saw that sometimes the female ate the male after eating, but also that the male does this crazy thing, and like, ties down the lady, basically I might name the spider after that, but why didn't they? Because they were men. They thought I was exceptional, that the female killed the male of my gosh. Can have that a .

lot of species of spider do this bridging thing. One theory, the one cussy, lays out that the males trapping the female. There's another newer one too, which is more accepted by scientists now that it's more seduction than a track, as a scientist put IT when they explained IT to me, its bondage yp spite as you bondage.

Myth number two, that her bite is fail. So from one thousand .

nine and fifty to one thousand nine hundred and fifty nine, the data we have says that there were sixty three deaths in the us. From black widowers.

Interestingly, most of the black widow bite victims backman seem to be male. In an older study, there were eighty percent mail. Here's a theory to why.

So most of the reported uh black widow tes from this time happened in what were called outdoor privies um out houses. So black winter spiders they enjoy a dark load to the ground sort of places they especially love to make their cobwebs between two objects. And so because bugs like stinky places, you know like imagine flies write flies in our houses, that IT makes a great like food supply right uh um and to get to the stinky stuff, you ve got to go through .

the ball right, right, right.

So putting your web there is excEllent. So imagine this is the hundred and fifties you're dude, you need to go number two, you make your way out to the out house, you sit down and you junk .

hangs there hangs. Yeah, that's what he said.

And as he does, IT hits the coward and the usually nonaggressive black, wide instinctual runs over and bites down on the new creature that has landed on its web.

Oh my god. Okay, that is like kind of terrifying. Well.

yeah, yeah there's .

like not even you can even imagine a Better situation, Taylor, to getting bit by the slike, usually very nonaggressive spider. They don't come after you.

And the statistics that you saw, yeah, how many bites were on penises?

The majority were on on penises.

Oh my god.

SHE thinks all these peace bites happening so regularly might be one of the reasons there were so many deaths back then.

The skin there is less thick, and there are lots of nerves there, right? And this is a neurotoxin vum. So.

oh, oh, oh.

perhaps being bit on the genitals since the Venus going into your body, and like a faster, stronger way, then say, if you were bid on a call us on your foot.

Anyway, the point is, once more people had indoor plumbing, along with improved axis to medical care. The numbers which weren't that high to begin with, they've gone way down. And in the last several decades, there's no record of anyone dying from a black, wide spider.

No one. In fact, the blackwood's, usually a pretty shy spider. Scientists of events and tests where they poke and prod her, trying to illicit a bit, and he turns to other defenses first, tries to run away, curls up into a little ball no bigger than a quarter. Sometimes SHE throws suck at the danger to try to escape. The bite is her last resort.

So yeah, I think that the world should know that they would ve been lied to. And this is a black spiders, not that bad.

And Kelsey has a proposal to set the record straight, change the spider er's name. easy. Get rid of the name. Admires her. And all this twisted lower SHE doesn't deserve.

I think that's what IT looks like. Ren ming, her black wide spiders, were not always called black spires. They've had many different names.

Some of the names are the hour glass spider, the t bar spider. The meanwhile, people indigenous to california called the spider poco mu, the one you likes best though. The shoe button spider, so cute. The shoe button spider, yeah.

SHE looks like a button, after all, a little round one. So I decided to test out this new name on the people I thought were the best suit to judge.

IT was like, my whole chest was an a ice cream.

I spoke with eight people who had been talk to eleven and others over email. Here are some of them.

Imagine like the worst crap that you've ever had in your life.

like a charly horsing your leg. But that being my whole back, like a really bad charlie horse that doesn't stop and helps your whole chest, right? I was like, twisting up my body, and I was like holding onto the side panel of the vehicle, embracing myself when I was happening. And so nearly enough, I kind of wondered, like, is this like what IT feels like to go in flavor?

Not everyone whose bit has a battery action like this. And again, bites are very rare and a lot of the time they're mild. But when it's bad, it's bad.

So iran kills his idea by them. Do you think we should we name the black widow spider, the shoe button spider? Thirteen people wait in. No one wasn't to IT.

Oh my god, I do not. I do not like bad at all. No, no. thanks. The people who named that the shoe button spider about me old days, but that is a very really named.

This is Jenny SHE got bit eight years ago in a porter body echo china.

I've ever seen a black winter spider like there. They are most cool, you know, they are sort of like sort of a spider. He shouldn't know where, and they probably have that rap, but I do like black window, like IT. IT gives you some power, and and I think those fightings definitely have power.

Someone else who had been bit told me, honestly, I think black widow is an excEllent name. And where I was spider, I would feel really cool the name like that.

So IT is one of the producers of our program, casi paging cohoes and podcast, fierce rivalry about big rivers and history, but also gossip, petty views of all sorts that is available. Whether you get you .

a podcast baby right this time, take little to. I know, let you rap this style, take my words and read a every day, keep post back, so you remember what say.

Most british day by the I chase people put together today show include Michael cometary men or joky, Henry gards and southern Kathy, Christina oo man, Raymond self, Christina and a senior daily executive eda is a manual daily rony and on forest Francesco tour and Francesco, this american life is looking at public radiation by P R X, the public radio exchange to becoming this american life partner.

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Tom mila. You know, he says that every weekend he sits there living in to local public radio station. My voice comes on.

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