Washington, D.C. — The OAS statement yesterday on Bolivia’s election should be retracted, said Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
On Monday, October 21, the OAS issued a statement expressing “its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results after the closing of the polls.”
“The OAS statement implies that there is something wrong with the vote count in Bolivia because later-reporting voting centers showed a different margin than earlier ones,” Weisbrot said. “But it provides absolutely no evidence — no statistics, numbers, or facts of any kind — to support this idea.
“And in fact, a preliminary analysis of the voting data at all of the more than 34,000 voting tables — which is all publicly available and can be downloaded by anyone — shows no evidence of irregularity.”