848: The Official Unofficial Record
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
There was another presidential election that happened recently, in another country, and it was an astonishing one, and it has an aftermath that is ongoing. I don't know if you followed this very closely, I did not. President Nicholas Maduro was up for reelection in Venezuela in July. That was on the line in this election. The 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 immigrated. Also, during Maduro's time as president, there has 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, according to the United Nations and human rights groups. But every six years in Venezuela, there is 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 had monitored, Venezuela's election system was "the best in the world." And this year, that got put to the test, when this brutal government went to the polls, but the very real possibility that they might get voted out of office. And the way it played out on the ground was this vast national drama and thousands of polling stations. Really, when you hear the details, it is remarkable what people did, hoping for a fair election. Today on our show, we have that story, and also a couple of other stories of people trying to set the record straight against very great odds. And WB EZ Chicago, it's this American life, I'm out of glass. And let's just get to it, like one of our shows called Best Actor in a Dramatic Role, Nancy Updite, that's 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 Anna Vanessa Herrera, 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 Madura as the winner with only the percentages of the voting, not the actual numbers of how many votes Madura got. This is very irregular. We have never seen this before. It was weird. I was absolutely shocked as a reporter covering Venezuela, I prepared for the worst, the most crazy things that you imagine, I prepare for that. But I've never, ever, 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.
Transcription truncated.