848: The Official Unofficial Record
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Join them this giving season. Donate at OxfamAmerica.org slash American. There was another presidential election that happened recently in another country, and it was an astonishing one. 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 in 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 WBEC Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

And let's just get to it. One of our shows 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?

I said, "I don't understand." You said, "I don't understand," out loud. In Spanish, it's, "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. 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 were, who started walking for hours, just, 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.

He started walking with his people just 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. 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 600K, 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, "Se Cientos Ca 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. 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 akta 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 akta. 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 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. 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.

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.

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 tighten and where to stretch, like how to be flexible in the negotiation, how to be flexible in the negotiation.

being kind of 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.

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, okay, if you don't get the acta, 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'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 Pedro's, 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.

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. And then we would act out different scenarios where, like, we had to face the military, in this case the army,

how to be on the one hand very jocosa, very charming and very, you know, like friendly and, you know, we're in this for the right reasons, we're all citizens and we're voting together and kind of 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 know, 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. 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. By law, they have to wait outside. Only the active witnesses are allowed inside. But 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 kind of running...

She was a chavista. Chavista meaning here a supporter of Maduro. Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chavez, so chavista.

A very older woman who was very arbitrary, very kind of not following the law. And this woman, me and my co-witness from the other table did a strategy where 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 kind of mean or just kind of 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.

You know, to the point that, you know, they were like, well, you're really complaining a lot. And she was like, I complain. 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, Maria's voting center had only two tables, even though in past elections it's had more.

Not only that, 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 like five minutes or more. So it was just like the slow poke table.

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. You know, 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, you know, saying, 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. 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. And, you know, 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, señora, 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, "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, "Then close it. For big issues, you need big remedies. You need to close it. And you know what? You will know that you closed it, it's on you because you were not able to control the situation."

Maria, is it hard for you to be vocal like that, to stand up, or is that how you usually are? So when you asked her, when you asked me, when you asked Maria, is this normal for you? She said, Pedro laughs because this is purely a part of who I am. You know, I come from a very humble place and a place where 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 compañera, 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, you know, I had to be very vocal and be like, que lo cierren, 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 he was, you know, that allowed me to feel a certain confidence that I'm sure not every witness felt.

There's a fervor in the way Maria describes her own vigilance that day that might sound familiar to Americans. Like in other countries' 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 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 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. The last hurdle of the day, and it's a big one. After the break, stay with us.

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This is 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. 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.

And only this bureaucrat person can handle the machine. So the one assigned to our voting booth was very, you know, she was very professional, very technical. She didn't have opinions doing her job. So from 6 to 7 p.m., 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. Now is when the aberration of this government begins.

Suddenly, you know, the bureaucrat is sitting there and it's like, oh, we can't transmit the data. It's the signal that 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.

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 tensed up. And then the chavista, other person who's my compañera's neighbor, she starts to get fired up after being tired. And then the people outside start to demand a hand couch. And then the tension starts to rise all over again with this bureaucrat person standing

basically saying, I can't transmit the result, I don't know what's happening, but I can't do it. 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. The

The moment that the data is not transmitting, we all start to help the bureaucrat to find signals. So we move the table from one side, we move the table to the other side. We try to kind of not touch the machine, but help her move the table to find the signal there. We're, you know, 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. Oh, my God.

Only living it can you fully understand it because it's just too loco, 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. Maria could only spend so much time on this table-moving craziness, though.

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, let's

She's like playing dumb a little. Sometimes I get a little bit lost. And like 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, sí, sí, sí, claro, 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. Finally, the data were transmitted, and the results at Maria's voting center were official.

It was a blowout. And we all looked at each other. The soldier, the bureaucrat, the chavistas, all of us just looked at each other knowingly that the opposition had won.

I finally get my act back. 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 kind of like a relay race. It really felt like being part of a movie. And so I give it to my compañera, and my compañera 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 act 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's euphoria was short-lived. The Electoral Council, known as the CNA, made their announcement just after midnight.

saying Maduro had won. 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. Oh, wow. 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. 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 Huayra. There's a woman reading results from a piece of paper, shouting to the crowd, Table 2, Edmundo, 303, Maduro, 194. ¡Mercado! ¡Mercado!

Table 4: Edmundo, 342. Maduro, 162. 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 showed 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 CNAA, 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 Pino,

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."

A member of the UN fact-finding mission said in a statement that out of the people detained after the election, "...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, María 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. Nicolas 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.

Nancy Updike. Her story was produced by Ana Yancey Diaz-Cortez. Ana Yancey was also the interpreter for Maria's interview. The story was edited by Laris Dzercheski. Just this week, for the first time, President Biden started referring to the candidate whose 600K showed got the most votes, opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez 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, okay, I guess it's human beings who want to recount, not the animals themselves, but you get the idea. Anyway, that's in a minute. I'm Chicago Public Radio. When our program continues.

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Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. For details, see mintmobile.com slash American. This is American Life from Ira Glass. Today's program, the official, unofficial record. Stories about people trying to set the record straight against great odds, real and perceived. We have arrived at Act 2 of our show. Act 2, Meanwhile in America. I thought this was an interesting sign of the times.

It started out in a very familiar scene and then went into a direction I did not expect. It happened on election night. My co-worker Zoe Chase and I were in Michigan in separate locations. It was late, but nobody knew yet who was going to win. And Zoe was at what would later become the Trump Victory Party in Michigan. And she ambled up to some people she's talked to in the past, Republican activists, including Todd Gilman. Now we're just talking about when the cheat's going to happen in Detroit. Are you serious? Yes.

I don't know if you can catch that. He said the cheat is going to happen at 2 in the morning and that a truck with California plates showed up at the convention center where they were at that very moment, counting absentee ballots for Detroit.

Online, there was a video of three supposed culprits carrying suspicious packages into some building at 11 p.m. It's posted on Twitter. I got to tell Ira because he's down there. He's watching for the steal to come in. Well, yeah, tell him that word has it a truck with California plates showed up. But why is a truck showing up this time of night? All the ballots should be there already. All right, let's do a 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 other very tired looking people, not exactly watching the steal come in, but with someone who was on high alert for any possible vote stealing shenanigans. One of the lead Republican poll challengers at the convention center, a guy named Jeff Schaper. So,

Zoe told me what you just heard about mysterious ballots arriving at the convention center at 11 p.m. on a truck with California 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 its significance, I should tell you first that Jeff Schaefer is a serious election skeptic.

Back in 2020, he was one of hundreds of people who rushed to this very spot, the Detroit Convention Center, certain that Democrats were here stealing the election for Joe Biden. Maybe you remember the crowds in Detroit chanting, "Stop the count." Okay, so that's where Jeff was back then. A Republican-led investigation in the state Senate later found no fraud, no harm to the vote count in Detroit,

But Jeff is still convinced to this day the Democrats were in there throwing illegal ballots into the system. Now you got to understand that in 2020, a lot of ballots were put out into the public.

So they had a store of ballots, progressives, that they could use. Use for fraud, he means. That is what I understand, and that is what I believe. Jeff started to work on election stuff full-time after that. Became the number two person at an activist group called Michigan Fair Elections. That does all sorts of lawsuits and election monitoring and public education.

That's how he ended up on election night 2024 as one of the lead Republican election challengers in Detroit, the location in Michigan I think it is fair to say that Republicans were most suspicious about. Before he retired, Jeff was a systems guy in the auto industry. He's got the air of a very sincere dad patiently helping you with your homework.

He also likes a good tagline. "Educate, investigate, litigate." That one came up in a bunch of stories he told me. My goal again, remember, investigate, educate, and if need be, litigate. So that's Jeff. And here's the moment that I thought was interesting.

When I told Jeff this breaking news about the trucks with California plates at 11 p.m., this election skeptic was not having it. How to say this, if you don't know the process, you see something and yell, you know, what that is, and looking at it, that looks like it's an election board. He tells me that 11 p.m. is when you would expect ballots to show up at the convention center.

And there's three supposed boat stealers in the video posted on X. They're carrying a white box, a red bag, and another box. You see these white boxes? Okay, that's a tabulator inside. Okay, you see those gray metal boxes? Those have the ballots in them. And then they have the poll book, which is in a red sealed bag. And that's normal process. It's interesting that you activists have become such experts that you're correcting misinformation that other people are putting out now.

Well, back in 2021, we did no squat. And it was a process of learning. We learned. I should say, for all the factual information that I saw Jeff give out on election night, he and his group do also spread information that does not seem as credible. Like, for example, the idea that Michigan's voter rolls, which, like other states, have a lot of inactive voters on them, are a real problem and might be used for widespread fraud. Michigan's Secretary of State disputes that. He and I talked about it. Neither convinced the other. ♪

On Election Day, Jeff and the other Republican poll challengers that I talked to, they were pretty happy with what they were seeing. Throughout the day, they all said the same things to me, that Detroit had adjusted a few procedural things in handling ballots since 2020. And those fixes were working. Ballots were counted in batches of 50 by small teams. Nobody moved on until there was agreement about each batch. It was a good, clean count. All I can say is what I've witnessed, the voting process has been

orderly, organized, invalid. And what's the mood inside between the Democratic and Republican vote watchers? Calm and cordial. Yeah, I mean, there's not much to argue about. There's been very few needs for adjudication. Adjudication to settle disputes. Jeff is involved in those because he's one of the lead Republican challengers. He says in eight days of counting... I've seen adjudications maybe 15, 16, 17 times.

15 times or so out of how many votes is that? 78,000 processed. If Harris wins, say in Michigan, would you believe the result? Yes, I would, based on what I've seen here. That is a really remarkable change, that in 2020 you're saying you don't believe the result, and you're saying this time around, even if Harris wins, you're inclined to think that you're going to believe the result. That's right, I do. Yes. He and other Republicans said this to me throughout the day, well before the results came in.

And I'll be honest, I am not sure I believe they all would have stuck by that if Harris won. After all, last time, it seems like nothing happened that could throw an election. Many court cases and a bipartisan state Senate investigation found no evidence of a steal, but they found all kinds of evidence and continue to believe it. But this time, Trump won, and the election doubters have been pretty quiet.

Late in the evening, or I guess it was the early morning, after it became clear that Michigan and the rest of the swing states were going to go for Trump, I asked Jeff if he felt like this was partly his doing. Like his years of work on election monitoring that paid off in an election that he could trust. Did he feel a sense of victory? Not victory, satisfaction. Satisfaction. And the job is not done. Tomorrow, we go back and we start working on the voter rolls that are bloated. Our work is not finished here.

This is a satisfying moment. It's just like a football game or a basketball game. You have one day to enjoy it, then you prepare for the next game. This is not going away. The doubts about elections in our country, the scrutinizing and arguing over them. It was interesting in the wake of Trump's very solid victory, there was mostly the Democrats you saw on social media wondering if the election was stolen.

There wasn't a ton of that. It was a tiny whisper of a complaint compared to the nonstop multimedia barrage of videos and charts we got in 2020 from Republicans. But if the election had been more of a real squeaker and Harris lost, I bet we would have heard a lot more of that. It is easy to see the appeal of that kind of doubt. Act 3? Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Okay, a quick heads up before we start this next story, that it mentions a part of the male anatomy. Take that under advisement. Pro and con.

It's not what you're going to do. It is not what the story is about. The story is about a creepy and dangerous creature that does all kinds of terrible things. It's also about somebody who takes issue with every word that I just said about that creature. And they want a recount. They want a reconsideration. They want us all to examine the facts and stop believing the fake news about this creature. Lily Sullivan met up with this person to hear her out. This person is my friend Kelsey Padgett.

And if you 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 widow spiders? What do you know? Okay. I know that they're very poisonous. Like they have a really bad bite, like a bite that can kill you. And I know that the female, after mating, like kills the male and eats him.

Fantastic. That is exactly what most people know about Black Widow spiders. And you're totally wrong. And this is Kelsey's mission. To expose the lies about this spider being a wanton murderess, correct the record, and restore her good name. Kelsey used to work as a park ranger in New York, by the way. She also used to report science stories.

And over the years, she's amassed an absurd amount of information about these spiders. So let me tell you. I'll start with the Black Widow name. The idea that the Black Widow eats her husband. Or the spider they just mated with. That she, you know, is a murderer dressed all in black. Mourning a husband that they just killed. Kelsey says, the female eating the male.

Okay, this has happened, but very rarely. And it's barely a noticeable trait if you look around at what the rest of spiders are doing. Many species of baby spiders, which are called spiderlings, often eat their siblings right after hatching.

And some species of spiderlings even eat their own mother after hatching. And sexual cannibalism, which is like eating your mate after he has done the deed with you, is very common in the spider world. But you know who is not common that much for is black widow spiders. They only do this in captivity. It's practically never been seen in the wild in the northern hemisphere. Yeah.

Meanwhile, the male spider, he's no Mr. Rogers. Check out what he does. So the male black widow will sometimes go around to the female's web and sort of clip off little parts of it so that she has no exit routes. And then he will go up next to her and like calmly like sort of caress her. And then he throws...

Oh my god.

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. And they thought it was exceptional that the female killed the male. Oh my gosh. Can't have that. A lot of species of spiders do this bridal veil thing.

One theory is the one Kelsey lays out, that the male's trapping the female. There's another newer one, too, which is more accepted by scientists now. But it's more seduction than a trap. As a scientist put it when they explained it to me, it's bondage. Yep, spiders do bondage. Myth number two, that her bite is fatal. So from 1950 to 1959, the data we have says that there were 63 deaths in the U.S. from black widow spiders.

Interestingly, most of the black widow bite victims back then seemed to be male. In an older study, they were 80% male. Here's a theory as to why. So most of the reported black widow bites from this time happened in what were called outdoor privies, outhouses. So black widow spiders, they enjoy dark, low to the ground sort of places, right?

They especially love to make their cobwebs between two objects. And so because bugs like stinky places, you know, like imagine flies, right? There's flies in outhouses that it makes a great like food supply, right? Uh-huh. And to get to the stinky stuff, you got to go through the bowl, right? Right, right. So putting your web there is excellent. Yeah.

So imagine this. It's the 1950s. You're a dude. You need to go number two. You make your way out to the outhouse. You sit down and you junk hangles there. Hangles. Yep. That's what she said. And as it does, it hits the cobweb.

And the usually non-aggressive black widow instinctually 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, though. It is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. There's like not even you can't even imagine a better situation tailored to getting bit by this like usually very non-aggressive spider. They don't come after you.

And the statistic that you saw, how many bites were on penises? The majority were on penises. Oh my God. She thinks all these penis 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 venom. So perhaps being bit on the genitals sends the venom away.

going into your body in like a faster or stronger way than say if you were bit on a callus on your foot. Anyway, the point is, once more people had indoor plumbing, along with improved access 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 widow spider. No one.

In fact, the black widow is usually a pretty shy spider. Scientists have even done tests where they poke and prod her, trying to elicit a bite. And she turns to other defenses first. Tries to run away. Curls up into a little ball no bigger than a quarter. Sometimes she throws silk at the danger to try to escape. The bite is her last resort. So yeah, I think that the world should know that they've been lied to. And that this, this, this, the black widow spider's not that bad.

And Kelsey has a proposal to set the record straight. Change the spider's name. Easy. Get rid of the name that mires her in all this twisted lore she doesn't deserve. I think that's what it looks like, renaming her. Black Widow spiders were not always called Black Widow spiders. They've had many different names. Some of the names are the Hourglass Spider, the T-Bar Spider,

The Miwok people indigenous to California called the spider Pocomu. The one she 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 suited to judge. It was like my whole chest was in a vice grip.

I spoke with eight people who'd been bitten, talked to 11 others over email. Here are some of them. Imagine like the worst cramp that you've ever had in your life. Like a charley horse in your leg, but that being my whole back. Like a really bad charley horse that doesn't stop and envelops your whole chest, right?

I was like twisting up my body and I was like holding on to the side panels of the vehicle and bracing myself when it was happening. And so weirdly enough, I kind of wondered like, is this like what it feels like to go into labor? Not everyone who's bit has a bad reaction 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 I ran Kelsey's idea by them.

Do you think we should rename the Black Widow spider the Shoe Button Spider? 13 people weighed in. No one was into it. Oh my God. I do not. I do not like that at all. No offense to the people who named that the Shoe Button Spider back in the old days, but that is a very lame name. This is Jenna. She got bit eight years ago. In a porta potty.

at Coachella. Have you ever seen a Black Widow spider? Like, they look cool. You know, they are sort of like, sort of a spider you shouldn't mess with. And they probably have a bad rap, but I do like Black Widow. Like, it gives it some power. And I think those spiders definitely have power. Someone else who'd been bit told me, honestly, I think Black Widow is an excellent name. Were I a spider,

I would feel really cool with a name like that. Lily Sullivan is one of the producers of our program. Kelsey Padgett is the co-host of the podcast Fierce Rivalries about big rivalries in history, but also gossipy, petty feuds of all sorts. It is available wherever you get your podcasts. Baby, write this down. Take a little note to remind you in case you didn't know.

Tell yourself I love you and I don't want you to go. Write this down. Take my words and read them every day. Keep them close by, don't you look so you'll remember what I forgot to say. Write this down.

Our program was produced today by Zoe Chase. The people who put together today's show include Michael Kamate, Emmanuel Jochi, Henry Larson, Seth Lynn, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Christina Olias, Nadia Raymond, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rummery, Alyssa Shipp, Lily Sullivan, Christopher Sotala, and Matt Tierney. Our managing editors, Sara Abdurrahman. Our senior editors, David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Tim Daly, Dorothy Kronick, Annalisa Pineda, Javier Corrales, Veronica Balleta-Flores, Francisco Toro, and Francisco Rodriguez.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange, to become a This American Life partner and get all kinds of bonus content, bonus episodes, AMAs, ad-free listening, plus hundreds of Greatest Hits episodes right in your podcast feed. Go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. Thanks to the life partners, Jehanne Gibson, Priya Elizabeth Harmon, Kelly Sherry, and Sally Sloan.

Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia. You know, he says that every weekend he sits there listening to his local public radio station. My voice comes on. And then the aberration begins. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Next week on the podcast of This American Life.

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