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 3 - Convenient Conclusions, Dodgy Assumptions
Even if the approach was dubious and the results were irreproducible, at least it presented something. The OAS press release the day after the vote had presented no such analysis — though it certainly did raise the volume of opposition protests. Amid cries of “fraud,” prominent members of Morales’s party and their families were assaulted or threatened with murder. Jeanine Áñez’s “interim” government — still in power today, having three times delayed new elections— would later cite the OAS reports as its near-exclusive evidence in its campaign to dismantle MAS.
Despite repeated requests, the OAS offered no justification for their claims. This, even though the results seemed in line with pre-election polls. With the preliminary count 84 percent complete, Morales had received more than 45 percent of the valid votes in a nine-way race. Yet under Bolivian electoral law, this would not be enough to win the race outright: only if he had an absolute majority, or a 10-point lead over runner-up Carlos Mesa, would Morales avoid a second-round runoff.
Morales’s lead increased steadily as the preliminary count had progressed. This offered no particular reason to think anything was odd. Rather, tally sheets from areas supportive of Morales have tended to be counted later than tally sheets from areas favorable to the opposition, and that was the case in this election. Imagine first counting votes from Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC, before considering rural Texas, Tennessee, or Alabama. Nobody would be surprised that the inclusion of Republican areas in the count would steadily chip away at the early Democratic lead.
Shortly before the announcement of partial, unofficial, preliminary results on the evening of October 20, there was a surge of votes counted from Santa Cruz — a hotbed of anti-Morales sentiment that dented the nearly constant good news for the incumbent president. In any case, the tally sheets that remained to be counted were coming from areas that had already shown, on balance, a strong preference for Morales. When the rapid count paused with 84 percent of votes counted, Morales’s lead over Mesa was only about 8 percentage points. Yet when the preliminary results were next reported, a day later, with another 9 percent of the vote, Morales had (tentatively) a 10-point lead — and his first-round victory.
Was this victory inexplicable — constructed in the darkness — as the OAS suggested? Was it a change of fate, or inevitable? My colleague Jake Johnston quickly put together an analysis of the results in the capital city of Cochabamba, where the swing was particularly visible. Breaking down the results by precinct, Jake showed that there was very little change in Morales’s support before and after the interruption of the count; in large part, Morales performed better, late, in Cochabamba, because precincts more favorable to the incumbent were — for whatever reason — counted later. A more rigorous approach over the entire election suggested by John Newman would show likewise: in the locality of Cochabamba, Morales actually underperformed late when the mix of precincts is taken into account.
So it went for the whole election. Consistently, studies have shown that once the different composition of precincts before and after the interruption is accounted for, Morales’s victory was predictable.
Source, links:
Comments
Post a Comment