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This American Life

848: The Official Unofficial Record

This American Life

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.688.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2024

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do you count almost 12 million votes if you’re not the government? This week, we bring you the extraordinary story of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who created the only verifiable public record of votes in their presidential election — and other stories of people trying to correct the official record with their own versions.

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  • Prologue: Host Ira Glass sets us up for Nancy Updike’s insider account of the recent presidential election in Venezuela. The story is an incredible national drama that plays out in thousands of polling stations across the country, with regular people trying to ensure a fair vote count that everyone can agree on. (2 minutes)
  • Act One: Producer Nancy Updike tells the story of the people of Venezuela trying to prove who won their recent presidential election beyond a shadow of a doubt. (22 minutes)
  • Act Two: Host Ira Glass spent America’s presidential election in the swing state of Michigan, where he found very little dispute over the ballot count from Republican poll challengers in Detroit now that they are doing the counting themselves. (8 minutes)
  • Act Three: This story is about a creepy and dangerous creature that does all kinds of terrible things. It’s also about someone trying to set the record straight on those exact assumptions about this notorious creature. (9 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0

There was another presidential election that happened recently in another country, and it was an

0:06.1

astonishing one, and it has an aftermath that is ongoing.

0:10.4

I don't know if you followed this very closely.

0:11.6

I did not.

0:12.8

President Nicholas Maduro was up for re-election in Venezuela in July.

0:17.1

A lot was on the line in this election.

0:19.2

Their economies and ruins, partly because of

0:21.6

Mador's policies, but made worse by U.S. sanctions, millions of people have left the country.

0:26.9

One in five people have emigrated. Also, during Maduro's time as president, there's been

0:31.8

an increase in government surveillance and government repression, arbitrary detentions of government

0:36.0

opponents or perceived opponents,

0:38.4

security forces arresting people or killing people during protests, according to the United Nations

0:43.6

and human rights groups.

0:46.1

But every six years in Venezuela, there's a presidential election.

0:50.4

And the country does have a real political opposition.

0:53.5

And the way they conduct their elections in Venezuela has all kinds of safeguards against election fraud.

0:59.0

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.

1:04.0

He wanted to prove to the world and to his opponents that he really had gotten the most votes every time.

1:11.1

Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center observes elections all around the globe, when said that

1:15.5

out of dozens of elections that they'd monitored, Venezuela's election system was, quote,

1:19.7

the best in the world.

1:22.3

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.

...

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