Caracas Chronicles

When María Corina Machado took the stage on July 29, 2024, just a day after Venezuela’s contested presidential election, she didn’t sound like someone who lost. Standing beside opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, she declared what few in the country dared to imagine possible: “We can now prove the truth. After 24 hours of uninterrupted work, our comanditos have done an exceptional job. While the regime slept, we didn’t, because we were very busy.”

Her words came in sharp contrast to the National Electoral Council’s (CNE) announcement hours earlier, which, with 80% of the votes counted, proclaimed Nicolás Maduro the winner with 51.2%. Machado countered that she had in hand 73.2% of the vote tallies—actas—that proved otherwise.

That claim, backed by tens of thousands of organized civilian volunteers, marked a turning point in Venezuela’s long and battered electoral history. For the first time since chavismo took power, a decentralized civilian structure—rather than a political party or an international observation mission—led a nationwide effort to collect and verify electoral data. The effort, orchestrated through comanditos (small grassroots monitoring cells), became the backbone of what Machado called “the largest act of electoral citizen oversight in Venezuelan history.”

Each comandito, largely made up of women in low-income neighborhoods, functioned as a micro-unit within a larger horizontal structure.

That collective effort — part self-defense, part civic awakening — may explain why Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize has resonated beyond her polarizing figure. It is not only a recognition of her leadership but of the thousands of anonymous citizens who, through their comanditos, undertook the most ambitious electoral monitoring campaign in Venezuela’s modern history.

A living creature of 60,000

The comanditos were part of a broader “electoral integrity plan” known as 600K, launched in January 2024 under the umbrella of the Gran Alianza Nacional (GANA), platform linked to the opposition coalition consisting of Machado’s Comando con Venezuela and the Unitary Platform. The plan’s goal was to organize 600,000 people across Venezuela to mobilize voters, monitor polling stations, and defend voting transparency in a context marked by political bans and disqualifications, intimidation, and the ruling party’s arbitrary control of the electoral system.

According to Esteban (a pseudonym for GANA’s coordinator in Caracas), the scale of the operation was unprecedented. “We built a super-structure across the country with over 60,000 comanditos, each formed by at least ten committed individuals with specific roles,” he said by phone. “In many places, the actas were extracted [from the polling station] and carried quietly, under complete anonymity, in contexts of violence and persecution.”

The state terror that began the day after the election, as a response to the comanditos’ achievement, has not waned since. 

Each comandito, largely made up of women in low-income neighborhoods,  functioned as a micro-unit within a larger horizontal structure that included comadres (community organizers), coaches, managers, captains, witnesses, and observers. Registration was as simple as filling out a Google form—a digital trace of an analog resistance. In some areas, members even developed personalized hand signals to communicate discreetly on election day.

Thanks to this strategy, Maduro’s electoral fraud during the 2024 presidential election was laid bare, extensively documented and verified. It could not have been possible without Machado’s vision, her technical knowledge and that of their allies, and over half a million people who worked together to make it happen. 

“We knew the risk”

For Arnellys, a comandito captain in Sucre parish, the task was as dangerous as it was vital. “In some centers, Plan República officers [soldiers tasked to guard the country’s polling stations] threatened people who tried to legally take copies of the actas,” she said from an undisclosed location. “But we knew it was our right. And we knew our work could put us at risk.”

In another Caracas neighborhood, Mauricio, a 30-year-old volunteer, decided at dawn on July 28 to stay at his polling station until midnight. “We weren’t organized beforehand,” he recalled. “But we wanted to make sure the process was carried out properly. By the end, there were 50 of us defending the vote.” When an officer forced him to delete photos of the actas, a polling station witness later allowed him to retake them privately—an act of defiance and trust that symbolized the spirit of the day.

By July 30, Machado announced that her teams had collected actas from all 24 states, claiming to cover 84% of the country’s polling stations. “We didn’t just win. We won by a landslide,” she told a massive crowd in Caracas.

Within 24 hours of the election, GANA published a public website containing digitalized copies of the actas. Designed as a simple Minimum Viable Product, the platform allowed anyone with a Venezuelan ID number to verify results from their polling center.

“This time, the people counted the votes. Not the regime.”

Tech journalists and cybersecurity experts praised the initiative’s efficiency and security. “It’s basic but robust,” said journalist Fran Monroy. “Despite multiple cyberattacks, the site has remained stable.” The actas were scrubbed of metadata to protect anonymity, and the site stored no personal identifiers beyond the ID query itself.

A second version of the website, launched on July 30, expanded functionality, allowing users to search by city or state and view general statistics. Independent developers also began building mirror sites to preserve the data in case the official ones were taken down.

Despite viral reports on social media about the arrest of opposition witnesses, human rights NGO Provea confirmed only three cases in the month after the elections. Still, fear and uncertainty marked July 28 for thousands, as most electoral witnesses had to go into hiding and could not openly talk to the press about their social organization and achievements. The state terror that began the day after the election, as a response to the comanditos’ achievement, has not waned since. 

Beyond logistics and technology, what sustained the comanditos was a sense of shared purpose. In Caricuao, a working-class district in Caracas, filmmaker Wendy Racines documented how the initiative extended beyond political activism: “The butcher donated three kilos of ham, a neighbor offered her car to transport elderly voters, others brought coffee. Everyone found a way to help.”

This is what the Nobel Peace Prize celebrated last Friday, in the words of the Norwegian Nobel Committee: “Hundreds of thousands of volunteers mobilised across political divides. They were trained as election observers to ensure a transparent and fair election. Despite the risk of harassment, arrest and torture, citizens across the country held watch over the polling stations. They made sure the final tallies were documented before the regime could destroy ballots and lie about the outcome. The efforts of the collective opposition, both before and during the election, were innovative and brave, peaceful and democratic.” 

As one volunteer said: “This time, the people counted the votes. Not the regime.”