New York Times and New Report Confirm CEPR Analysis Refuting OAS Claims of Flawed Bolivian Election Results
JUNE 07, 2020
Washington, DC — Nearly eight months after incumbent Bolivian president Evo Morales was ousted in a coup d’etat amid allegations of electoral fraud, The New York Times reports that the Organization of American States’ (OAS) claims of fraud in the November 2019 general elections “relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques.”
The Times article focuses on a new report from Nicolás Idrobo, Dorothy Kronick, and Francisco Rodríguez. The report, which uses detailed electoral data previously unavailable to researchers outside of the OAS, refutes OAS claims that fraud altered the election results. For months, the OAS has resisted calls for it to release its data and methodology. The authors show that they were able to predict the final outcome of the election within three one-hundredths of a percentage point, using data from prior elections and votes counted before an election night interruption of the vote.
“For those paying close attention to the 2019 election, there was never any doubt that the OAS’ claims of fraud were bogus,” said Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Research Associate Jake Johnston, coauthor of an 82-page report on the Bolivian election and the OAS audit of that election. “Just days after the election, a high-level official inside the OAS privately acknowledged to me that there had been no ‘inexplicable’ change in the trend, yet the organization continued to repeat its false assertions for many months with little to no pushback or accountability.”
CEPR analysts, using publicly accessible electoral data, came to similar conclusions regarding the false nature of the OAS’s claims in reports published in November 2019 and March 2020. On October 21, 2019, just one day after Bolivia’s election, the OAS denounced — without providing any evidence — a “drastic” and “inexplicable” change in the trend of the vote count following an interruption of the transmission of the election results. At the time, CEPR was quick to note that the data simply did not back up the OAS claims. Nevertheless, on November 10 — the day the OAS released an audit of the election reiterating its claims of an inexplicable change in the trend — the Bolivian military called on Morales to resign, and the president sought asylum in Mexico. An unelected government remains in power today with the strong support of the country’s military. The military’s repression of anti-coup protests resulted in dozens of deaths and scores of arrests.
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https://cepr.net/press-release/new-york-times-and-new-report-confirm-cepr-analysis-refuting-oas-claims-of-flawed-bolivian-election-results-2/
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