Thread by @MarkWeisbrot

THREAD: Bolivia held its presidential election on October 20th — and since then, there has been a lot of confusion around the vote tallying process, which is still ongoing. 1/x

There are two main candidates: Evo Morales, the current president, and Carlos Mesa, a former president.

Morales generally has higher support in rural areas, whereas Mesa has higher support in urban areas such as Santa Cruz de la Sierra. This is important to keep in mind. 2/x

There are potentially two rounds in the election. In the first round, if any candidate has either 1) more than 50% of the vote or 2) at least 40% of the vote, and a vote total that is 10 percentage points higher than the next highest candidate, they win outright. 3/x

In this case, Morales is close to winning outright (latest results: with over 97% of votes counted, he leads Mesa by just under 10 percentage points).

If Morales doesn’t have that 10 percentage points margin, there would be a second round between Morales and Mesa. 4/x

The confusion arises here: the Bolivian electoral authority, the TSE, has two counts: the non-binding “quick” count (called TREP) and the “slow” count, or the official count. 5/x

Individual ballots are counted transparently in voting stations and aggregated into “actas,” the official records. The results from the actas are sent to the TSE via an app, along with a photo of the acta itself, and verified by the TSE. This is the quick, non-binding count. 6/x

The actas are then physically sent to an electoral tribunal, where the information is verified and entered into the official count. This calculation is open to any public observer, provided they don’t disrupt the process. This is the slow, binding count. 7/x

The quick and the slow count are both affected by geography and infrastructure. Rural and poorer places, which heavily favor Morales, are slower to transmit or send the actas to the TSE. 8/x

As anyone who has stayed up watching election results in the United States can attest, some places report results more slowly. This effect is larger for a country like Bolivia. 9/x

On election day, the TSE released the quick count data at about 83%. This should not have been a surprise to anyone. 10/x

The TSE already had previously announced that the quick count would cover at least 80% of results. Here’s the TSE on October 9th: la-razon.com/nacional/anima… 11/x

When the quick count issued a new release the next day, Morales’s margin over Mesa had increased.

But @OAS_official released a troubling statement that questioned the delay in reporting results and the trend in the vote count — without supporting evidence. 12/x

The OAS said of the quick count results: “The OAS Mission expresses its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls.”

But were the results hard to explain? 13/x

In fact, Morales’ gains in later results are easily explainable from the data. The later results (the ones reported after the first 83 percent) came from areas where he had much more support.

Appendix 1, here, analyzes a part of the results: cepr.net/press-center/p… 14/x

The city of Cochabamba had 106,925 new votes in the second quick count release. Overall, Morales gained 13.3 percentage points more of the new votes than he did with the initial votes. 15/x

But if you drill down to the precincts of Cochabamba, instead of the city overall, you find that the trends by precinct are very much in line with what they were previously. In fact, Mesa did better in some of the precincts than he had in the earlier reported votes. 16/x

In summary, these later precinct results favored Morales, simply because he has high support in the areas that take longer to report results. 17/x

And, based on an analysis of the votes outstanding in the official count (which has had similar results to the quick count so far) it is likely Morales could win the election with a more than 10 percentage-point margin over Mesa.

(See Appendix 2: cepr.net/press-center/p…) 18/x

All of this data is freely available from the TSE.

Nothing is stopping the OAS, Mesa, or anyone else from analyzing it, or viewing the underlying scanned actas. And the TSE has already invited the OAS to audit the results. 19/x

Yet in the time since election day, the OAS, Mesa, and US officials like Marco Rubio have called the results into question, without providing any evidence or reason to doubt the official results. 20/x

The OAS should either provide evidence in support of its statements questioning the election results, or publicly retract these statements. 21/x

Such statements increase the risk of violence and instability and can undermine the legitimacy of the democratic process by feeding conspiracy theories about stolen elections. 22/x

The OAS has a responsibility to fulfill its mission as an independent, impartial observer — it is a disservice to democracy in the hemisphere to do otherwise. 23/23