When the Venezuelan government announced that strongman Nicolás Maduro had won the presidential election, the opposition was one step ahead.

Expecting that Maduro would claim victory no matter the results, hundreds of thousands of volunteers organized to monitor the election had already pulled reams of printouts from voting machines tallying millions of votes, a vast majority of them in favor of opposition candidate Edmundo González.

They were scanned, verified and uploaded to the internet — so fast that when global leaders demanded the Maduro regime provide detailed proof of the election results, it was the opposition that delivered evidence of its victory by publishing printouts of the results for the world to see.

Those efforts, detailed to the Miami Herald by a key insider, have become a crucial cog in the international pressure building against Maduro — who is accused of stealing the election — and in support of González, who has now been declared by the United States and other nations as Venezuela’s rightful president elect.

“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Thursday night, citing the opposition’s proof and corroboration by independent observers.

“In the days since the election, we have consulted widely with partners and allies around the world, and while countries have taken different approaches in responding, none have concluded that Nicolás Maduro received the most votes this election.”

Blinken congratulated González for winning the election and called for a peaceful transition of power.

The efforts to prevent Maduro from stealing the election took several months of work and coordination, according to opposition strategist Lester Toledo, who spoke to the Herald on Thursday. The project was so successful that the Maduro regime has accused Toledo and others involved of hacking the nation’s elections — an allegation the U.S. and other nations have dismissed even as activists have been detained in Venezuela.

‘Anonymous Heroes’

The plan, which relied on 600,000 volunteers broken up into groups of 10 called “comanditos” and spread across any of the roughly 15,700 voting precincts around the country, included “a bunch of anonymous heroes” that “built the largest electoral roll that the opposition has had in 25 years,” Toledo said.

It was designed to take advantage of a constitutional right that allows previously approved campaign volunteers to observe voting, and receive and take home printouts of results called actas from each Smartmatic voting machine.

In each group of comanditos, responsibilities were divided up. There were witnesses for each voting machine, lookouts outside the centers to ensure everything ran smoothly and monitors who made sure the actas were printed and then taken to outside locations to be scanned and, ultimately, uploaded to a centralized cloud as the opposition prepared to launch its website.

Election Day didn’t go without any hiccups. Toledo alleges that around 4 a.m., two hours before the polls were set to open, members of the government party tried to take the place of witnesses and poll workers that had already been agreed upon.

“That was a problem for us because if they take away my witnesses, which I organized for months, on that day which is like the final of the World Cup, they’re not seated in their seats or in their positions, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything,” Toledo said.

But the national guard, for the most part, Toledo said, helped establish order and only allowed those who had been pre-approved to take those spots.

When the polls were set to close, Toledo said he received reports from about 90% of the volunteers that the government had ordered election workers to not print the actas. But after a tense period of back-and-forth, soldiers with the national guard allowed most volunteers to take the actas home anyway, Toledo said.

That ended up being crucial.

In Caracas, where Venezuela’s National Electoral Council was overseeing the election and receiving transmissions of vote tallies from thousands of voting machines, officials blocked access to the opposition’s two national witnesses while official results were supposed to be printed out. Enrique Marquez, one of a handful of presidential candidates, said his own campaign monitor was allowed in the room and reported that the Council did not print the results of the election.

Despite that — and despite exit polling and partial election results strongly suggesting González had won with about 70% of the vote — Council President Elvis Amoroso announced that Maduro had won the election with 51.2%, causing outrage and confusion.

Publishing the truth

As Amoroso proclaimed that Maduro had been reelected to a third presidential term that would last until 2031, opposition volunteers were taking copies of 24,576 voting tallies to centers in each state with scanners that could upload them to a drive. They used QR codes included on each acta to tally the votes.

Within 24 hours, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado gave a speech Monday night saying she had proof of González’s victory, and then a site launched where Venezuelans were able to check their table’s actas using their national ID number.

By Tuesday, the opposition had launched another site where more detailed results and each individual acta was available for the world to see.

People outside the effort were inspired to try to preserve the proof. Outside of the official volunteers, a handful of Venezuelan coders in the country and in other parts of the world have been coordinating via the website X and other forms of social media to scrape the sites launched by the opposition and create backups of all the actas in different clouds. Scraping involves using coding systems or bots to extract data and images from a website.

Juan Carlos Andreu, who is one of the coders doing the work and sharing updates with his followers on X, told the Herald that the goal is to have as many actas in decentralized online locations as possible, like Github, where the images themselves can live and be backed up without the need for a complex website that can easily crash or be blocked by the regime.

After the vote

As days went by, the regime found itself under intense international pressure to provide the election tallies supporting the claim that Maduro had won, not only from traditional critics such as Peru, Argentina, Ecuador and the United States, but also from friendly governments like Brazil and Colombia.

Allegations that the regime was racing to fabricate fake actas circulated earlier this week.

But Toledo said that he was not concerned.

“The law is very clear, when you’re past the election you have 48 hours to publish the actas. That time ran out Tuesday night. That’s why Maduro’s proclamation is totally illegal,” Toledo said.

The actas are signed by two witnesses each, which Toledo said would be impossible for the Maduro government to fabricate.

“What are they going to do about the signatures from our witnesses?” Are they going to jail 30,000 people? ... It’s impossible.”

After his failure to provide the actas, Maduro’s next move was to announce that he would introduce the case to the Venezuelan top court. “I throw myself before justice,” he said on Wednesday outside the Supreme Tribunal of Justice headquarters in Caracas, adding that he is “willing to be summoned, questioned, investigated.”

But the announcement did little to appease concerns of possible fraud in Venezuela, given that the regime has held absolute control over the Venezuelan courts for more than two decades, in the same way that it controls the National Electoral Council.

Toledo said there was no way the opposition would participate in that process, which he called a sham, as it would be Maduro’s justices alone in the room deciding the fate of the election.

The proof of Gonzalez’s win, he says, is already published.

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