At the end of election day in Venezuela, an opposition-accredited observer asked for a copy of the tally showing the total votes cast for each candidate at the polling station he was monitoring.
A soldier refused, and when the observer insisted it was his legal right, dragged him to a bathroom – and locked him inside.Only when everyone else had left the polling station was the observer released.
On the street outside, a man sidled up, and thrust him a piece of paper – it was an electoral official, who, during the commotion, had secretly printed an extra copy of the voting tally. “Here, take this, don’t tell anyone I gave it to you,” he said.
The observer took a photo of the QR code and sent it through a secure messaging app. Then he went to a house nearby where other volunteers were using a roll-fed scanner to digitize copies of the tallies they had gathered.
Similar scenes played out across the country that Sunday night, in a meticulously planned operation involving tens of thousands of opposition volunteers working together to reveal the true outcome of the election.
Venezuela’s government-controlled electoral council soon claimed victory for Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian political heir of Hugo Chávez, who it said had won with 51.21% of votes, compared with 44.2% for his rival Edmundo González.
But within 48 hours of the election the opposition coalition announced that their candidate had won – and they had the evidence to prove it.
Thanks to a plan months in the making, opposition activists had succeeded in gathering more than 83% of the voting tallies: long printouts resembling till receipts, which showed that Maduro had in fact won just 30% of the vote, compared with 67% for González.
The scanned tallies were uploaded to a website, which displayed the overall result, and the outcome for individual polling stations.
“It has been a brilliant political move by the opposition, an extremely impressive logistical achievement”, said Andrés Pertierra, a PhD candidate in Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Basically, the opposition is forcing Chavismo to own up to the fact that they’re stealing the election.”
The operation to gather the tallies was prepared over nine months and, impressively, carried out in broad daylight under one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes.
“We already knew that the CNE [the government-controlled electoral council] was not an impartial referee, so from the start, we knew we needed not just to win but to prove that we won,” said one opposition activist, who asked for anonymity for fear of arrest.
In the weeks before the election, about 5,000 workshops were held across the country to train the volunteers: political party members, activists, youth groups, and also citizens with no political affiliation.
“We taught all the electoral laws and what each person should do on election day,” said the activist, who estimated the plan involved more than 1 million people.
Their roles included observers and those who scanned and uploaded the tallies to a central database, drivers, cooks, and the data and IT specialists responsible for the website.
“There was such a tremendous desire to participate in this election that our challenge was not to find people but to figure out how to orchestrate a logistics plan that would allow us to know the result,” the activist said.
Although the strategies were not publicly disclosed in detail, the plan’s existence was never a secret.
In January, the opposition figure María Corina Machado – who named González as her replacement when she was barred by the government from running – announced the creation of the “600K” network, a reference to the number of volunteers they hoped to gather: 600,000.
“I ask you to set up your own campaign command with Venezuela, in every house, in every workshop, in every school, in every church … in every space where you and your people organise. We will have thousands and thousands of campaign commands,” she said in a video.
Activists were trained to use a special app to report delays or irregularities at polling stations, and to scan the QR code on every tally.
In an effort to thwart the campaign, the government added new hurdles to the process of registering as an observer. Polling stations were guarded by soldiers, police and Chavista loyalists who successfully managed to deny access to the tallies in about 16.5% of the 30,026 polling stations.
“They tried,” said the activist. “But they failed to stop us in the end.”
Maduro’s government has dismissed the opposition’s result as a fraud, but the tallies have been verified by four independent analyses, carried out by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Colombian NGO Misión de Observación Electoral and the election forensics professor Walter R Mebane Jr from the University of Michigan.
“Throughout history, there have been contested elections in which [people have said] ‘it was probably stolen,’ but there was never really anything to compare and contrast against it,” said Pertierra, then adding: “Now, not only has the opposition managed to collect all this data … but it forces Chavismo to not be able to muddy the waters and either nakedly steal the election or give up power.”
Venezuela’s top prosecutor, Tarek Saab, a Maduro loyalist, has said that he would open a criminal investigation into the opposition’s result website, alleging forgery of public documents, computer crimes and conspiracy.
Access to the opposition’s results website has been blocked inside Venezuela, where it can only be accessed via VPN. But the evidence it displays has helped intensify diplomatic pressure on Maduro.
The US and other countries have recognised González’s win, while even the leftwing governments of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia – traditionally more sympathetic to Chavismo – have urged Maduro to release the complete voting tallies. Venezuelan authorities have claimed that is now impossible, asserting without evidence that the electoral council’s website has been hacked.
“Chavistas now are in a very difficult position in trying to defend the legitimacy of the results because it’s really hard to explain them at this point. If Maduro’s results were legitimate, why couldn’t he just show them?” asked Pertierra.
Meanwhile dozens of activists involved in the operation to secure the tallies have been swept up among at least 1,200 people who have been arrested since election day.
Andrés Caleca, a former chair of the electoral council, said: “The heroes of this election were not only the voters who came out in their millions to vote, but also the opposition’s observers at the polling stations.”
