The Americans Outside My Window

Ira Glass· Host0:00

Hey, everybody. Ira here. This, uh, thing that you're listening to right now is a little bonus episode that we decided to throw down the feed in addition to the new show that we just made, which is called New or Drop, which come out at the regular time on the feed Sunday night and should be sitting right next to this bonus episode in your podcast app. Let me, uh, take a second and explain what you're listening to right here. When the United States attacked Venezuela last week and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, I kept thinking about this story that Nancy Updike did for our show a while back about the 2024 election in Venezuela. In that election, there was this massive grassroots effort, not just to oust Maduro and elect the opposition candidate, but also they knew that they were gonna have to prove that the opposition actually won. And so what that meant is tens of thousands of volunteers around the country planned and trained for months. And then on election day, they not only managed to get a huge turnout, going out and voting, they also organized this whole thing where they went around and they collected paper copies of the vote totals for most of the voting centers around the country. Okay, so they have these paper receipts. They scanned these vote totals, added them up, put everything online, proving that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, beat Maduro and beat him decisively.