The OAS accusation of electoral fraud against Evo Morales is bullshit — and now we have the data to prove it

The day after the Bolivian election, the Organization of American States suggested the result was fraudulent — then took months to provide any proof. Last month, it finally released its data — and researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found a basic coding error that destroys the OAS’s case against Morales.

by David Rosnick 

Part 1

August 20 was a day that shook a small world of scientists that had all but given up — short of legal threats — on getting a glimpse into the data and methods behind the analyses that took down the Bolivian government. Slowed by stonewalling and gaslighting, researchers had managed to re-create some — but not all — of the results presented by the Organization of American States (OAS) in its case against the legitimacy of Evo Morales’s reelection last October 20.

The OAS had alleged, the day after the vote, that the preliminary count contained an “inexplicable change in trend” of the preliminary results — drastically skewing in Morales’s favor. But its claim was dubious to begin with. As early as October 22, we began raising serious questions suggesting the “inexplicable change” was quite predictable.

The OAS would later support its allegation by claiming that the official count also contained a late break for Morales that “cannot be easily explained away” by Morales’s generally rural support specifically because the official count “data do not reflect the time the results were reported to the TSE [Tribunal Supremo Electoral].” This premise is entirely wrong; votes from the main cities were much more likely to be counted early, because the official count required hand delivery (rather than electronic transmission) of electoral materials to TSE offices.

Faulty reasoning aside, the OAS results were irreproducible.

Ten months later came the revelation that some of the OAS’s previously baffling conclusions are explained by a coding error. It had ordered the time stamps on the tally sheets alphabetically rather than chronologically — thus destroying its narrative of a sudden change in the official count.

Source, links:

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/oas-evo-morales-bolivia-coup-fraud-cepr

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