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 4 - The OAS Final Audit

The OAS analyses have been notable for a steadfast refusal to consider such intra-geographic differences, presuming — contrary to all evidence — that a candidate’s support should be more or less uniform throughout the count.

The OAS final audit report on December 4 was explicitly biased in casting doubt on Morales’s first-round victory. The audit team expressly looked for irregularities on tally sheets that heavily favored Morales — justifying this selective search based on alleged statistical evidence that Morales’s victory was “inexplicable.” However, the statistical evidence presented in the OAS audit was not merely unconvincing; the analysis was completely wrong. The analysis boiled down to two points.

First, the OAS argued that the last 5 percent of the vote in the unofficial, preliminary count showed “a striking upward trend . . . that is quite different.” However, it is not unusual for late swings in a count to prove decisive. As noted in an open letter by economists and statisticians:

                         It is not uncommon for election results to be skewed by location, which means that results can change depending on when different areas’ votes get counted. No one argued that there was fraud in Louisiana’s 16 November gubernatorial election, when the Democratic candidate John Bel Edwards, pulled out a 2.6% point victory, after being behind all night, because he won 90% of the vote in Orleans county, which came in at the end of the count.

The order in which preliminary results were reported publicly was slightly different than the order in which Irfan Nooruddin (the author of the OAS statistical analyses) considers them. Many tally sheets throughout the count were transcribed but set aside for later approval. Those approved at the end tended to be much more representative of the entire election— even unfavorable to Morales. Regardless, the upward trend in Nooruddin’s data was predictable based on the earlier data, because his late tally sheets came from areas that had overwhelmingly shown strong support for Morales.

Second, Nooruddin argued that this finding is bolstered by the fact that the last 5 percent of the vote in the official count was also inconsistent with the previous 95 percent and again the penultimate 5 percent. Specifically, the OAS presented graphs showing that Morales’s vote share increased sharply after the 95 percent mark, while Mesa’s plummeted.

But these results were completely irreproducible. Until August 19.

Source, links:

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

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