Venezuela: What Witnesses Saw on July 28th at the Polls
Strategies for hiding the tally sheet print outs until they reached the designated locations, a result of collaboration between witnesses and neighbors.
By Venezuela Vota / La Hora de Venezuela / Efecto Cucuyo
HAVANA TIMES – “I put it in a little book of the Constitution that I had brought and put it between my legs.”
Between the law and her body: this is how an opposition witness safeguarded the voting results from a polling station north of Barquisimeto, in Lara state, on election day on July 28th in Venezuela.
In Caracas, they found another hiding place: “We put it inside our clothes, in our bellies. Then a large group came to accompany us to where the tally sheet copies were being received,” says a witness from a polling station in Candelaria, Caracas.
The strategies used by the witnesses of the opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez’s campaign organization to protect the electoral records were varied. However, a common factor was that they had to struggle for several hours with the polling station coordinators from the National Electoral Council (CNE), poll workers, supporters of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), community councils, and even paramilitary to obtain them.
Venezuela Vota, an alliance of independent media outlets, consulted 17 witnesses and polling station members from the Capital District and six states to gather these testimonies.
The “order from above,” according to those who agreed to be interviewed anonymously for this report, was to prevent opposition witnesses from receiving the paper record that the machine prints once the voting at each station is closed. Having the records is the only guarantee of proving how many votes each candidate received. Historically, for the opposition, reaching agreements to cover all the polls with party-accredited witnesses to collect and validate the records had been complex. This time, it seems, they learned from their mistakes.
On July 28th no one was alone:
- “When they handed it to me, I folded it up and put it in my pants pocket, and I left escorted by the neighbors who came to support us,” recounts a witness from Vargas.
- “I safeguarded the record with another person until midnight when I handed it over to the coordinator of the campaign,” says a witness from Barquisimeto.
- “We protected them by moving them from person to person until they reached the hands of the person who had to deliver them to the situation room,” participants explained from Lagunillas, Zulia state.
- “In my case, since it’s a small center, I waited in the parish for an opposition electoral coordinator to pick me up. I was voting for the first time, and it was the first time I was at a polling station,” says a witness from Maiquetia, near the international airport in Vargas state.
A network of citizen participation was essential in this electoral effort designed by the opposition: while the witness was inside doing their work of verifying the process and obtaining the record, outside, a circuit of other people was waiting to get the tally sheet to a place where it would be scanned and sent to a web repository. “There was a design with supporters, managers and coaches who managed to centralize scanning points by zone. They were taken by motorcyclists. That process flowed perfectly,” says a member of Gonzalez’s Con Venezuela campaign team.
Thanks to this relay race, the opposition managed to collect 24,532 records, representing 81.32% of the total tally sheets, which were uploaded to the Resultados con Vzla website, where anyone, anywhere in the world, can review them and analyze their authenticity. Independent organizations such as the Colombian Electoral Observation Mission, data visualizers from the Spanish newspaper El País, the Associated Press news agency, and curious individuals have done so.
The consensus, for now, is that the records have a high level of trust. This data, open to the world with the intention of proving what the opposition considers to be fraud by the Venezuelan National Electoral Council, would not have been possible without the witnesses’ logistical effort of vote protection.
A hostile afternoon as an intimidation method
Although from the moment the centers opened, there were already reports that the right to have party witnesses receive a certified copy of the vote tally sheets — by law — would be denied, starting at four in the afternoon, two hours before closing the centers, the threat became more vocal: “There are no records for the opposition here.”
If the intention was to get the witnesses to leave the center, it did not work.
“At 4:00 pm, they told us not to insist, that there would be no records for the opposition. I was sitting at my table, and suddenly the CNE center coordinator told us that if we wanted, we could leave because they weren’t going to give us any record. I asked why, and she said they were orders from above,” says a witness from Vargas, a traditionally Chavista state, where Edmundo Gonzalez obtained 61% of the votes, and Maduro 36%. After doubling his insisting, he left the center with his copy of the tally sheet.
“They told me that in previous elections they gave [the print outs], but not now. However, they gave it to me because I had stood my ground there. I told them it was an electoral crime [not to give them],” reveals a witness from the Tamaca parish in Barquisimeto, formerly a stronghold of the ruling party where the supply of water and cooking gas is in the hands of the pro-government paramilitary and ruling party leaders.
At a rally on August 3rd opposition leader María Corina Machado made it clear that the campaign had the vote tally sheets and published them on August 1st thanks to their determined poll witnesses, and despite efforts by the PSUV governing party witnesses, Plan Republica military election security agents, and CNE electoral officials attempts to expel opposition witnesses from the voting centers.
In Vargas, a witness said she had never seen such a level of intimidation in 30 years of participating in elections: “Obtaining the records was a real battle. With the CNE center coordinator, with the PSUV witnesses, and with the Plan Republica officers who supported everything the CNE coordinator said.”
In response to the witnesses’ determination, state security forces carried out arrests and arbitrary detentions of witnesses in Caracas and other cities.
The opposition published the tally sheet records
It took Maduro several days to react to the opposition’s resource of showing the world the detailed tally sheet results, each with its unique “fingerprint.”
Five days after the election, Jorge Rodriguez, president of the National Assembly (AN) and Maduro’s campaign chief, questioned the legitimacy of the records published by the opposition. He presented photos of supposedly mutilated or incomplete records at a press conference. His arguments were dismantled by social media users who showed the original records. Six days after the election, PSUV deputy Diosdado Cabello also said he would do a special edition of his TV program “Con el mazo dando” due to the records of the “coup-plotting opposition.”
Meanwhile, the CNE has not published the numbers by polling place, region, or candidate as standard procedure mandates. Instead, the CNE website has been down since the Monday following the election — and Nicolas Maduro’s campaign has not shown the tally sheets given to them by their witnesses. The Plan Republica, military guarantors of the electoral process’s security, also received a copy of the records. However, only the opposition has shown them for the world to see.