The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) republishes this CELAG analysis entitled “On the OAS and the elections in Bolivia” to provide more background information on the unfounded narrative regarding an alleged “electoral fraud” in the Bolivian elections of October 20. Unprecedented in the history of the OAS, that false theory has been disseminated by the organization’s own Secretary General, Luis Almagro, to justify his support for the forced resignation of Bolivia’s democratically elected president, Evo Morales.
CELAG’s technical analysis agrees with the findings of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR, that the OAS report is incomplete, partial, and does not provide sufficient technical background for the irregularities found selectively to constitute fraud under any circumstances.
CELAG concludes that “instead of relying on a technically sound electoral audit, the OAS prepared a questionable report to induce a false conclusion in public opinion: that the increase in the gap in favour of Evo Morales in the final stretch of the count was widened by fraudulent means and not by the socio-political characteristics and dynamics of electoral behaviour that occur between the rural and urban worlds in Bolivia”.
Below is the complete analysis of CELAG, which can also be found on their website:
The findings of the CEPR study on elections in Bolivia analysis allow us to affirm that the OAS preliminary report does not provide any evidence that could be definitive to demonstrate the alleged “fraud”.
CELAG has conducted a detailed study of the OAS report “Analysis of Electoral Integrity General Elections in the Plurinational State of Bolivia October 20, 2019 – Preliminary Findings. Report to the General Secretariat”[1] based on their own analysis and taking up the contributions of the document “What happened in the recount of votes in Bolivia’s 2019 elections? El papel de la Misión de Observación Electoral de la OEA”[2], prepared by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
The findings of the analysis allow us to affirm that the OAS preliminary report does not provide any evidence that could be definitive to demonstrate the alleged “fraud” referred to by the Secretary General, Luis Almagro, at the session of the Permanent Council held on November 12[3]. On the contrary, instead of relying on a technically founded electoral audit, the OAS prepared a questionable report to induce a false deduction in public opinion: that the widening of the gap in favor of Evo Morales in the final stretch of the count was widened by fraudulent causes and not by the socio-political characteristics and dynamics of electoral behavior that occur between the rural and urban worlds in Bolivia.
A precedent to consider is that on October 23, prior to the start of the audit requested by the Bolivian government and with the official calculation in progress, the OAS Electoral Mission issued a preliminary report in which it “recommended”, without any technical basis, the holding of a second round of elections as the “best option”[4].
The following are the main conclusions:
On the analysis of the interruption of the TREP (Transmission of Preliminary Electoral Results). The OAS report omits to state that, as the CEPR report points out, the usual practice, announced and agreed upon by the parties prior to the electoral process, included a commitment by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to publish preliminary data obtained from the TREP rapid transmission system with a number of verified minutes accounting for 80% of the total. At 7:40 p.m. on 20 October, when the publication of results was halted, the data load had reached 83.85% of the verified minutes. As the same report points out, the TREP’s performance was similar in previous Bolivian elections[5].
The graphs in the OAS report on the TREP system reveal nothing except what we already knew, that is, that the loading of minutes into the system was interrupted with 83.85% of the verified minutes, and then resumed. In the meantime, the graphs on the pro/anti-Morales ratio only support one obvious conclusion: that, in the late-night loaded zones – the rural areas – Morales’s support is far superior to that received in the early-night loaded zones.
The OAS report also introduces arbitrary, non-technical statements by using the term “unusual” to characterize the behavior of trends in data loading: “In the last 5% of the count, 290,402 votes were counted. Of these, Morales won 175,670, or 60.5% of the votes, while Mesa obtained only 69,199 votes, or 23.8%. In other words, in the last 5% vote, Morales increases the average vote by 15% compared to the previous 95%. It is not “unusual” that Morales would have obtained percentages of support around 60%, and even higher, in some areas of the country, and mainly in the rural areas of the two departments that were last loaded: Cochabamba and Oruro. See in this regard the results of the 2014 elections, in which MAS obtained an average of 84% of the votes in rural localities, or the 2016 elections in which 71% voted Yes in the Referendum.
Based on a rigorous mathematical exercise, it is entirely possible that the projection of the TREP results at 100% would have resulted in a difference in Morales’ favor of more than 10%, which derives from the fact that the areas with the greatest electoral weight in the MAS were those that were least advanced in the computation. Assuming that of the 16.15% of the minutes remaining to be charged at the time of the TREP halt, one third would have been in urban areas, as candidate Carlos Mesa argued, and two thirds would have been in rural areas, and with the conservative hypothesis that Morales would have obtained 60% support in these areas, the final result would have been 47.3% vs. 36.4%, i.e. a difference of 10.9 points. This result is consistent with the one finally obtained from the official calculation.
As confirmed by the projections made by CEPR (What Happened in Bolivia’s 2019 Vote Count?: The role of the OAS electoral Observation Mission):
“The counting of legally binding official votes did not stop for any significant period, and the trend in the results in the official count is very similar to the trend in the results of the fast transmission.
“The TREP results are not difficult to justify or ‘unusual,'” as the OAS points out, but “the gap between Morales and Mesa widened steadily as the counting process advanced.
“The partial results of the rapid transmission up to the moment of its interruption predict an outcome that is extremely close to the final results.
It should be clarified that, although the OAS mainly focuses its audit on the TREP system, the only binding result under Bolivian law is the one emanating from the official vote count. The TREP system, implemented by the country from 2016 on the recommendation of the OAS itself, is of a preliminary nature and does not provide official results. It is very striking that the report makes few and brief allusions to the official computation without any kind of technical support to support the claims it makes.
At the same time, in a not very rigorous manner, the OAS states in its report that: “It is foreseeable that having more time to process more documentation would result in an even greater number of irregularities,” which cannot in any way constitute a reliable demonstration of the existence of such irregularities.
On the analysis of an alleged falsification of signatures in the official computation minutes. The few paragraphs in the OAS report devoted to analyzing this point are based on a non-representative sample of the total of the minutes. Only 333 of the minutes (out of 34,555) are observed, of which 78 (0.22% of the total) have irregularities, which are not a random sample of the total but quite the opposite: they constitute a sample biased by their selection. As the report points out: “In order to make up this sample, tables were selected in which the MAS obtained 99% of the votes and the consecutive tables, that is, those from the same voting center. Any rigorous audit would have carried out a random sample of the set of minutes in order to establish a statistically relevant conclusion.
Finally, as the CEPR report reminds us, it is necessary to point out that there are other fully effective mechanisms in the Bolivian electoral system that acted throughout the process to guarantee the transparency of the electoral process.
Finally, as the CEPR report reminds us, it is necessary to point out that there are other fully effective mechanisms in the Bolivian electoral system that acted throughout the process to guarantee the transparency of the elections:
207,322 Bolivian citizens participated as voting juries in this election, at a rate of six for each polling station. All voting juries must sign the scrutiny minutes at the end of the election.
The delegates of the political parties participate in the scrutiny and endorse the calculation made in each of the 34,555 polling stations.
Finally, the images of the counting minutes are available online for anyone wishing to confirm that the information on the physical counting sheets matches the information entered into the official counting system.
Footnotes
[1] http://www.oas.org/documents/spa/press/Informe-Auditoria-Bolivia-2019.pdf
[2] http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/bolivia-elections-2019-11.pdf?v=2
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KklG3V3PZTQ
[4] http://www.oas.org/fpdb/press/Informe-Preliminar-MOE-Bolivia-23-10-19.pdf-MOE-Bolivia-23-10-19.pdf
5] (i)In the 2016 constitutional referendum, the TSE held a press conference at 6.15 p.m. on election day where it announced preliminary results with 81.2% of the processed minutes. (ii) On the occasion of the 2016 autonomic referendum, the TSE published preliminary results at 7.30 p.m. with a processing level of between 66.7 and 100% of the minutes according to each jurisdiction. (iii) In the 2017 judicial elections, preliminary results were released at 9:30 p.m. with 80% of the processed minutes, endorsed at the time by the OAS Electoral Expert Mission.