Bolivia

Escobari and Hoover calculate party vote shares in a nonsensical manner. While this does not have a large effect on their estimates, it often does matter to their discussion of results.

If they find that the late-reporting polling stations showed elevated support for Morales, they are hard-pressed to say that the late reporting caused the elevated support as opposed to any other cause or causes for delay — benign or malicious — inducing

The “shutdown” does not offer a true opportunity for a natural experiment because the “treatment” group is neither plausibly similar to the “control” nor known to be treated in any ordinary sense.

Votes were not counted at random and that the problem of counting nickels before dimes is real and must be accounted for when the count is incomplete

When counting votes in an election, the only thing that matters is the final count. So long as we count all the votes, the order in which we count is unimportant.

This is the first in a series of blog posts addressing a report by Diego Escobari and Gary Hoover covering the 2019 presidential election in Bolivia.

Escobari and Hoover’s approaches to fraud detection are faulty and their claims to have measured fraud in the 2019 Bolivian elections are not supported.

The failure of the OAS to explain false claims of fraud it made during the Bolivian elections in 2019 continues to fuel doubts about its ability to monitor elections fairly and objectively.

CEPR recent work and media appearances involving Bolivia

CEPR’s work looking at the 2019 coup d’etat in Bolivia that ousted the elected government was decisive in refuting the false narrative that was deployed, and unfortunately reported for nearly a year in major media, that the 2019 election was stolen.