Caracas Chronicles

This piece was originally published in Spanish on El Pitazo, as part of the initiative #LaHoraDeVenezuela

“I stuffed the ticket into a copy of the constitution and kept it in my crotch.”

Between the law and her body, that’s how one of the opposition’s electoral witnesses at a voting center north of Barquisimeto, Lara state, hid the voting tally, or acta, she was supposed to collect during last Sunday’s presidential election.

In Caracas, they found a different hiding place: “We put the tally under our clothes, in front of our bellies. After that, a large group escorted us to the place where the campaign command was collecting all the tallies,” says a witness from La Candelaria, in Caracas.

Witnesses from the Comando Con Venezuela, the campaign command of opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, had to come up with a varied set of strategies to be able to collect and transport the voting tallies they were to collect in voting centers. In most cases, they had to fight personnel from the National Electoral Council (CNE), members of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), communal councils and even pro-government paramilitary groups (colectivos). Collecting the tally sheets is a right.

Venezuela Vota, a coalition of independent media outlets, interviewed 17 electoral witnesses and polling station members in Caracas and six different states to hear their stories.

“Orders from above” say witnesses who preferred to keep their identities anonymous, was preventing them from gaining access to the tallies printed by voting machines after polling stations closed. The tallies are the only way to confirm the number of votes obtained by each candidate. The opposition has historically had difficulties guaranteeing the presence of witnesses in all polling stations to collect these long printed receipts, but they seem to have learned from their previous mistakes.

On July 28th, for instance, no one was left alone:

“As soon as they gave me the tally I folded it, put it in my pocket and left the voting center, escorted by my neighbors, who went there to help us,” explained a witness from Vargas state.

“Me and someone else guarded the tally together, until we were able to deliver it to a campaign coordinator at 12 am,” says another witness from Barquisimeto.

“We passed it (the tally) from one person to another until it reached the individual tasked with delivering it to our local situation room,” explains another one from Lagunillas, Zulia state.

“In my case, since my center is small, I waited for one of the opposition coordinators to come and pick me up. It was the first time I voted, and therefore, the first time I had to stand by the polling station to wait for the tally”, says a witness from Maiquetía, a location close to Venezuela’s main international airport, in Vargas state.

There were 30,026 voting tables in this election, spread across 15,797 voting centers. All votes must be recorded in actas, or voting tallies: printed documents that establish the total votes for every candidate at a voting table. Voting machines produce a printed tally at each voting center before those tallies are sent back to the CNE’s headquarters in Caracas. Witnesses representing all candidates at a voting table must sign that print-out. After a tally or acta is printed and signed, the machines connect to the internet to send the data electronically to the CNE, which puts up the tally on its website.

Read more in “Actas”: the Key Documents at the Center of the Electoral Conflict

A complex network of citizen participation was essential to complete this relay race designed by the opposition. While a witness verified the results of the election and collected the tally after the polling station was closed, a circuit of different collaborators waited outside of the voting center to make sure it was delivered to the place where the tallies would be scanned and uploaded into a web repository. “The campaign command, along with the comanditos (de-centralized campaign units characteristic of the campaign designed by Maria Corina Machado’s team) set up scanning centers that covered specified voting centers. The tallies were carried there by mototaxi drivers, and the whole process worked perfectly” explains a member of González Urrutia’s command.

This relay race allowed the opposition to obtain 24,532 voting tallies across the country, which represents 81.32% of all the tallies printed during the election. These tallies were then uploaded to the Resultados Con Venezuela website, where they can be easily accessed and audited by anyone, anywhere in the world. This platform has already been used by independent observers, such as the Colombian Electoral Observation Mission, and incorporated into data analysis and visualization works by El País (Spain), the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post and curious individuals.

The consensus, so far, is that the tallies uploaded by the opposition are trustworthy. The opposition’s strategy to prove to the world that the CNE committed electoral fraud when it announced Maduro’s victory last week is centered on this open data approach, something that would’ve been impossible without the witness network.

A hostile afternoon as a method

Immediately after polling stations opened on Sunday morning, opposition electoral witnesses started hearing rumors that they would be refused access to the tallies, even though their right to collect a certified copy of them is explicitly stated in Venezuelan electoral law. As the closing time of voting polls (6 pm) approached, these rumors became vocal threats: “There are no tallies here for the opposition”.

If this was meant to discourage witnesses so they left their centers, it didn’t work.

“At 4:00 pm they told us that we should stop being annoying, that the opposition would not receive any tallies. I was sitting at my polling station, and the CNE coordinator suddenly told us that we should get going, because they wouldn’t give us any tallies. When I asked why that was, she simply mentioned “orders from above,” says a witness from Vargas, a traditionally chavista state where Edmundo González secured 61% of the votes, against the 36% obtained by Maduro. After insisting, he finally left the voting center with his tally.

“They told me that even though tallies were regularly handed to witnesses in previous elections, that wouldn’t be the case this time. However, they ended up yielding and giving me the tally, after I stayed planted there and told them that denying me access to the tallies was an electoral felony,” revealed a witness from the Tamaca parish, in Barquisimeto, another former chavista stronghold where access to cooking gas and water is directly controlled by PSUV members and colectivos.

Even though opposition leader Maria Corina Machado mentioned that members of the Plan República (the military officers assigned to monitor the voting process) and CNE officers helped get the tallies, interviewed witnesses indicate that in many cases, these individuals, with collaboration from PSUV members, tried to kick opposition witnesses out of voting centers.

A witness in Vargas says that in 30 years participating in elections, he had never seen such a degree of intimidation. “Securing those tallies was a fierce battle against the CNE coordinators, PSUV witnesses, and Plan República officers, who supported everything the coordinator said.”

Some witnesses in Caracas and other cities of the country were detained for their determination in securing the tallies.

It took a while for chavismo to react to the opposition’s move to show the tallies to the world just a couple hours after the election’s results were announced. Each tally is supported by its unique digital identifier, which certifies its authenticity.

Only after five days, Jorge Rodríguez, speaker of the National Assembly and Maduro’s head of campaign, questioned the authenticity of the tallies published by the opposition. Rodríguez presented pictures of tallies that had been apparently mutilated, or that lacked signatures from some witnesses. His arguments were systematically dismounted by users in social networks. A day after, Diosdado Cabello also discredited the validity of the tallies in his television program, Con el Mazo dando.In the meanwhile, the CNE has failed to publish any disaggregated data of the election, and its website remains down since Monday 29th. While Nicolás Maduro’s campaign also had access to tallies printed by voting machines, they still haven’t shown any. The military, through the Plan República should also have a copy of the tallies. However, only the opposition has shown any evidence to sustain its claims.