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 2 - Unjustly Forced Out

The damage, of course, had already been done. On November 11, 2019, Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales — his term not yet complete — stepped down from the presidency amid allegations of fraud. Decisive was the report from the OAS, which had just presented its preliminary findings in a binding audit of the October 20 election. These findings were not favorable to Morales, questioning his official first-round victory.

Members of the opposition, some of whom had been saying all along that Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS-IPSP) party would attempt fraud to stay in power, took to the streets in violent protest. Though Morales agreed to annul the election, the head of the military told him he should step down. He resigned and embarked on a dramatic flight from Bolivia to Mexico — barely making it out alive, according to the Mexican foreign minister.

This isn’t the first time the OAS has deployed poor statistics to overturn election results. In 2010, the OAS intervened in Haiti, demanding that the third-place candidate be permitted to participate in a runoff election with the first-place candidate — leaving the runner-up, who just happened to be the only non-right-wing candidate, out in the cold.

To be sure, security surrounding Bolivia’s election was insufficient. At the risk of whataboutism, the same could be said of most any election in the United States. However, the OAS’s findings presented in November were otherwise full of insinuation and short on detail. The OAS presented no actual evidence that even a single vote was altered. Instead, it offered a statistical analysis that statistician Andrew Gelman characterizes as “a joke.”

Source, links:

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

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