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OAS Final Audit Report on Bolivia Elections Raises More Questions about its Own Work than It Answers
For Immediate Release: December 12, 2019
Contact: Dan Beeton, 202-239-1460
Washington, DC ― The Organization of American States’ final audit report on Bolivia’s October 20 elections appears intended to “justify the organization’s … unsubstantiated claims of fraud,” a preliminary analysis from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) finds. The CEPR analysis, by Senior Research Associate Jake Johnston, constitutes CEPR’s initial review of the OAS audit report; a more complete analysis is planned for release at a later date. While the OAS report does not mention CEPR’s earlier analysis of the election results by name, it does include what are clearly intended to be references to it.
“The OAS audit report raises more questions than it answers,” Johnston said. “Not questions so much about the elections or the electoral process, but about the OAS’s trustworthiness in conducting the audit and reporting its results.”
CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot noted that the OAS Electoral Observer Mission has committed serious and puzzling errors throughout its reporting on the Bolivian election. These errors began with the first press release, the day following the election, when the mission expressed “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results.” In fact, this change was neither drastic nor hard-to-explain, but simply a result of pro-MAS voting areas tending to report later than other voting areas.
“It’s amazing that in its fifth publication on the election, the OAS once again refused to consider the possibility that this ‘change in trend’ had a simple explanation, which can be seen in basic arithmetic analysis of the election results, as well as statistical analysis,” said Weisbrot.
More:
http://cepr.net/press-center/press-releases/oas-final-audit-report-on-bolivia-elections-raises-more-questions-about-its-own-work-than-it-answers-cepr-analysis-concludes
