Bolivia: That Was Quick!

It was barely more than a month ago — October 3 to be exact — that I made fun of a big spread the previous day in The Nation, declaring the country of Bolivia to be the latest, greatest “Remarkable Socialist Success Story”! This was in the midst of the run-up to the October 20 election, in which Socialist hero President Evo Morales was to stand for his fourth term. By October 24, Morales had claimed outright victory in the election, and a mandate to serve another five years..

And then yesterday, Morales may or may not have resigned. That was quick! How could this all have gone so wrong so fast?

To start with, there was the small problem of allowing the electoral machinery to be fully controlled by people loyal to the incumbent bent on re-election. Surely then, wouldn’t Morales’s people have no problem turning any remotely close result into a clear victory? Sometimes what seems like an advantage may not turn out that way. As it happened, the governing rules required the leading vote-getter to achieve a margin of 10 points or better over the runner-up to avoid a run-off. As returns came in on election night, Morales was leading, but by less than the 10 points. Then suddenly, officials suspended reporting the results for 24 hours. When the count was supposedly complete on October 24, Morales claimed 46.95% of the vote, to 36.6% for his top opponent, Carlos Mesa. Sure, Evo!

Apparently recognizing that there was going to be a huge degree of skepticism about that result, Morales agreed to let the Organization of American States send people in to audit the result. From an OAS press release on November 10:

On October 30, the OAS General Secretariat and the Government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia signed the agreements relating to the analysis of the electoral integrity of the elections held on October 20. Those documents established that the Government would provide every facility needed to perform a proper audit of the official vote count in the elections of October 20. . . .

Also released yesterday was the full Report of the OAS auditing team, available at this link. Although expressed in dry language, the Report makes clear that the efforts of Morales and his people to rig the election were remarkably obvious, crude and amateurish. For example, this under the heading of “forged signatures and alteration of tally sheets”:

In some cases, it was confirmed that all the tally sheets in a center had been completed by the same person. Sometimes, that person turned out to be the MAS representative accredited as the party's delegate in the voting center concerned. Likewise, several tally sheets were found in which the government party obtained 100% of the votes. In some of those documents, the fields for opposition parties had not even been filled in with a "0". In some of those voting tables, moreover, attendance was 100%, which is practically impossible.

(MAS is the name of Morales’s political party.) And yet still the vote was not coming in at the desired level. This led to a mad post-midnight scramble on election night to create enough votes to put Morales over the top.

[One] especially interesting moment[] in this election . . . [was] when processing of the tallies reache[d] 81%, just before the TSE stop[ped] reporting progress with the vote count. That [was] the moment when an abnormal number of tally sheets [were] uploaded in the TREP system, coming from a server that was unknown at the time. . . . Clearly the MAS did very well in the final 5% of the cumulative vote. . . . In the last 5% of the count, 290,402 votes were counted. Of those, Morales won 175,670, that is to say 60.5% of the votes, while Mesa obtained only 69,199 votes, that is to say, 23.8%. In other words, Morales’s average vote share increased by over 15% compared to the previous 95%, while Mesa’s average vote share plunged by about the same percentage.

The conclusion of the OAS auditors:

The audit team cannot validate the results of this election and therefore recommends another electoral process. Any future process should be overseen by new electoral authorities to ensure the conduct of credible elections.

Really, Evo, you should have been flunked out of Evil Dictator School for having learned so little about how to properly rig an election.

Anyway, with the issuance of the OAS Report, demonstrations in Bolivia have taken off, some of them apparently turning violent. Apparently, the Bolivian military told Morales that they could no longer support him. From Reuters yesterday:

Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Sunday he was resigning to ease violence that has gripped the South American nation since a disputed election, but he stoked fears of more unrest by saying he was the victim of a “coup” and faced arrest. Video footage showed clashes on the streets of La Paz and some buildings on fire Sunday night after the military called on Morales to step down and allies deserted him following weeks of protests since the Oct. 20 election.

But my bet is that Morales will run in the next election. And good luck to the Bolivians in coming up with anyone even semi-independent to conduct the next round.

Meanwhile, does anyone want to take bets on whether the great Bolivian economic success reported by The Nation last month will turn out to be real once somebody else gets a chance to report the numbers?