Main Paineframe posted:

The CEPR report is pretty comprehensive and detailed. And given that you can't find any sources contradicting it, and that you freely admit that you lack context or basic knowledge on the issue, it doesn't sound like you have any reason to discount it. Actually, it's weird that you even brought up Haiti in the first place if you knew so little about it that you had to fall back on pleading ignorance as soon as you were challenged on it. If the sum total of your position is "here's what I found on Wikipedia", then why the hell are you even trying to discuss the intricacies of the subject? The only thing you seem to know is that any information that contradicts your opinion doesn't count, and that the goalposts can be moved as many times as necessary. You say that the OAS has no power, but when confronted with the biggest examples of OAS using their power, you say that it doesn't count.

As for your talk about alternate solutions in Haiti, it sure looks like you're saying that democracy isn't necessarily that important after all, and that sometimes an election just has to be stolen and an opposition movement crushed in order to avoid a civil war. All for the sake of stability (as defined by powerful regional actors)! Of course, this completely contradicts your position on how important it was for the OAS to promote democracy in Venezuela and relentlessly pursue all potential electoral irregularities even if it means causing civil war or an attempted coup. Did you get so caught up in defending the OAS's own contradictions and inconsistencies that you didn't notice your own position had done a 180, or is this just a situational ethics situation where the most important factor in any contested election is making sure the leftmost candidate loses?

uninterrupted posted:

Dismissing obvious election fraud inflicted by OAS because you can't find enough non-'partisan' sources (though christ knows what that's supposed to mean) is absurd, and the same liberal-poisoned train of thought that led people to believe CIA involvement in Pinochet's rise was a crazy conspiracy theory.

V. Illych L. posted:

reminder that the OAS' smoking gun was a statistical regression which completely ignored the distribution of voters by constituency, prior polling and patterns in previous elections

V. Illych L. posted:

actually, squalid, if you're going to play the 'actually these countries that otherwise fulfill my criteria aren't democratic' game just give a list of countries you think are comparable to bolivia in terms of democratic history and poverty

i did also mention albania, which had serious irregularities in an election people i personally know were observing, but those were local elections so probably don't warrant a coup i guess, and those are unfortunately what i've followed in terms of election observation stuff

ZearothK posted:

Both those regimes are widely considered to have been dictatorships, even if they were convenient for US interests.

ZearothK posted:

If any Latin American country had a system where the presidential candidate with less votes regularly won elections it'd be sanctioned and liberated very quickly, hell, if any Latin American country only allowed two very similar parties to compete for leadership it'd be constantly called out for supressing political movements.

vyelkin posted:

Because he tweeted this like two days before the recent incompetent invasion attempt

https://twitter.com/AmbJohnBolton/status/1256015582689988610

Munin posted:

You imply that US administrations have genuinely cared in he past about how democratic the institutions of a country that they deal with and recognize are. As everyone in this thread should be aware of below the fine rhetoric the actual power brokers don't give two hoots about it. They happily support regimes committing all sorts of institutional and electoral abuses as long as they are willing to admit to US political and economic hegemony. All members of Operation Condor were military dictatorship of various stripes and of course Operation Condor had the open tacit and covert active support of the US. They also of course happily support countries with free elections and strong institutions etc but they don't do so because of these elections and institutions. It is because they are willing to play ball with the US and align themselves with them.

Squalid posted:

Squalid posted:

I didn't bring up Haiti. uninterupted did. When I asked for specifics he declined to provide them. I also haven't discounted Weisbrot, as far as I know everything he's said in his article has a factual basis. The reason I'm pleading ignorance is these issues are clearly complicated and technical, so actually having an opinion requires information. If you know something I don't then you should share it, as of right now we it appears we've all read the same article and are working with the same information, and that limits us in the same way. If you have more information, then it means we can expand the scope of discussion. Maybe instead of something specific to Haiti, you have resources on the proper procedure for electoral recounts? Or how to conduct political mediation? Unfortunately I'm not an expert in this field, as an economist I don't think Weisbrot is either, and its weird he didn't even offer the OAS's explanation of their own actions.

Weisbrot provides no evidence the OAS committed fraud. He presents no evidence the OAS lied about its process. In the article Weisbrot suggests no motive for fraud on the OAS's part. There is instead a highly technical argument about recount methodologies and best practices. It's not a stretch to say that such practices will have to be contingent on circumstance, custom, and available resources, and that its normal for their to be disagreement on the subject among experts. I don't think I said the OAS should promote democracy in Venezuela, whatever that means. I don't think the OAS has done any monitoring in Venezuela after 2012, but prior to that as far as I'm aware it always found that they were generally free and fair. Certainly if there was evidence of them committing fraud during Venezuelan election monitoring then I would be critical of that. You complain about me defending the OAS, but is it so much to ask for any kind of evidence of fraud? Come on, there has to be more people saying it than this one guy.

Squalid posted:

Weisbrot provides no evidence the OAS committed fraud. He presents no evidence the OAS lied about its process. In the article Weisbrot suggests no motive for fraud on the OAS's part. There is instead a highly technical argument about recount methodologies and best practices.

uninterrupted posted:

Dismissing obvious election fraud inflicted by OAS because you can't find enough non-'partisan' sources (though christ knows what that's supposed to mean) is absurd, and the same liberal-poisoned train of thought that led people to believe CIA involvement in Pinochet's rise was a crazy conspiracy theory.

Sampatrick posted:

i mean, i think its incredibly transparent that squalid is a white supremacist and supports the military and police dictatorship in bolivia at this point. theres a reason why they ignore every reference to the terrible poo poo that the military has done in bolivia while constantly acting like they werent even involved. theres a reason why they claim that the police didnt actively take actions during the coup in spite of the clear and present fact that they did so. if you support the regime of the christofascist state, if you deny the military actions of the christofascist state, then you just might be a fascist yourself.

V. Illych L. posted:

nah the main finding from the OAS preliminary report was the regression from the quick count and their discrepancy with the final announced result, all the other stuff was literally just technical poo poo that is eminently plausible in a poor, spread-out country. when you said that the irregularities in bolivia were exceptional for a country of those circumstances, i provided counterexamples in iraq and afghanistan with which i happened to be familiar, which you poo-poohed because they're not real enough democracies for you which gels awfully poorly with your sudden distaste for quantifying democracy. at this point I recalled albania, another country which i think is somewhat comparable and where the electoral authorities and the opposition were literally in disagreement about the polling day, which seems more egregious than poor electronic security

the rest of your point here is literally 'well the other fraud didn't spark a coup so it's not as bad' which is weird circular nonsense

V. Illych L. posted:

like the whole point is that bolivia's electoral irregularities weren't that major and not conclusive evidence for centrally directed electoral fraud, and indeed that this sort of irregularity is not uncommon in poor, rural countries, especially with major fault lines and that the OAS denouncing the election in its preliminary report is thus best interpreted as an effort to legitimise the seizure of power by the army and paramilitaries

e. though if the argument is actually 'coups are fine if they're successful' that's of course another matter, but i try to credit people with motivations which aren't completely monstrous when able

Main Paineframe posted:

Why do we need more information? The CEPR reports have everything that's needed. The only reason you'd need more is if you don't like the CEPR's conclusions, but aren't able to argue against the report on its own merits and are looking for a talking head to come up with a counterargument for you.

The point of a recount is to count all the votes, not to throw out more than a tenth of them, disenfranchising a massive chunk of the voting population. Recounts are meant to increase the accuracy of vote counting in close elections (since human and machine error introduces a certain margin of error to vote counts). They're meant to double-check for the possibility of clerical errors, scanning mistakes, misplaced tallies, and stuff like that. Recounts are just recounts, designed to address the unavoidable percentage of genuine errors and mistakes in any election, and lack any ability to clear away outright tainted votes. If a significant amount of the vote is marred by likely fraud, to the point where the ballots themselves are untrustworthy. In that case, the only legitimate remedy is rerunning the entire election.

If you want evidence of the OAS committing fraud, they did so the moment they pretended that it was possible to turn a deeply tainted vote into a legitimate election result just by doing a recount and throwing out some tally sheets. The vote counts they released in their final count were fraudulent, and they knew that the counts were fraudulent because they did not have the information necessary to determine accurate counts - nor did they put all that much effort into trying to do so.

uninterrupted posted:

You're looking for, what, videotaped confessions? Sworn statements?

quote:

Un informe de la Misión Técnica de Expertos Electores de la Unión Europea dio a conocer el viernes que sus observadores detectaron “numerosos errores e irregularidades en las actas electorales”, durante los comicios presidenciales celebrados el pasado 20 de octubre en Bolivia.

Según el documento, “figuraban actas con un número inusualmente elevado de votos nulos, votos en blanco y una participación del ciento por ciento de los electores en una serie de mesas electorales”.

En su informe, los miembros de esta misión especial encargada de velar por el proceso democrático libre y transparente en Bolivia comprobaron que “varias actas deberían haber sido anuladas”.

quote:

On 5 November, Professor Walter R. Mebane at the University of Michigan used his own "eforensics" model to detect and predict the level of fraud that occurred during the election.[73][74] He estimated that there were between 20 450 and 24 664 fraudulent votes which were subdivided into votes that were abstentions (no votes) that were then transferred to MAS and votes that were initially for other parties but later changed to MAS. With this level of fraud, he initially determined that it would not have been enough to change the results of the elections (Morales would have had a margin of 10.16-10.27%, depending on assumptions) although on 13 November Mebane said that feedback from colleagues led him to believe that "best formula" for the model led to a new reallocation which indicated that Morales would have had a lead of 9.9% over Mesa, requiring a runoff election.[74]

On 8 November 2019, Ethical Hacking, the tech security company hired by the TSE (under Morales) to audit the elections, stated that there were multiple irregularities and violations of procedure and that "our function as an auditor security company is to declare everything that was found, and much of what was found supports the conclusion that the electoral process be declared null and void".[75] In their official report, one source for the OAS, they stated "We cannot attest to the integrity of the electoral results because the entire process is null and void due to the number of alterations to the TREP source code, the number of accesses and manual modifications with the maximum privileges to the databases being created during the electoral process and the inconsistencies in the software that arose in the TREP and Computo."[76][77][78]

quote:

On 12 March 2020, Professor Rodrigo Salazar Elena, researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico, wrote an article in Voz y Voto magazine in which he compares and discusses the claims and evidence shown in the OAS and two CEPR studies. [97] In it, he states that the 27 February report is "except in a few details, a replica of the same analysis", referring to the earlier CEPR study, and that lack of statistical knowledge led commentators to be guided by the prestige of MIT and Washington Post and take the conclusions of the CEPR for granted. With regard to the OAS audit, he states that the statistical analysis rests on the "continuity assumption" that, even with different voting groups, change in vote trend should not exhibit large discontinuities around a single point in time and they use a "duly justified analysis technique". He states that "a rebuttal of the OAS analysis would have to mention which feature clearly distinguishes voters on either side of the threshold, to account for the jump of about 10%." He claims that such methods are available and describes CEPR-MIT's insistence on concentrating on group differences as "somewhat frustrating". With regard to simulations done by CEPR-MIT, he states no objections to their "highly sophisticated" method, but notes that it rests on the assumption that voting patterns are geographically contiguous "despite the fact that they are different in terms of reporting the votes to TREP". On this assumption, he provides two possible objections. Firstly, that geographic contiguity is less plausible than the "continuity assumption" made by the OAS and, secondly, that the pattern of stations voting before and after the TREP cutoff are not due to chance. In conclusion, he states that "If you read a headline like "Simulations from MIT specialists show Evo won in the first round," it sounds as if they are launching rockets into space. Not so, not even close. On the one hand, the OAS analysis has not been properly refuted. On the other hand, the CEPR-MIT analysis is valid only if one is willing to believe in an assumption that is at least as difficult to sustain as that of the OAS audit."

brugroffil posted:

Squalid posted:

I don't think in these cases we look for "conclusive evidence for centrally directed electoral fraud," that would be very difficult. Instead we ask if it violated any basic standards of trust and security, and then conclude if it meets our predetermined standards. Like sure, nobody is surprised when President Yahya Jammeh tried to overturn his loss in the 2017 election in the Gambia. Just as nobody was surprised when it triggered an invasion and his removal. Because that's the kind of poo poo that happens when your political system is dishonest.

brugroffil posted:

https://twitter.com/EricSmart96/status/1257725921550884864

Cup Runneth Over posted:

it's easy to paint with a broad brush, but they really aren't necessarily a fascist. you just have to remember that liberals hate socialists more than fascists

Cup Runneth Over posted:

it's easy to paint with a broad brush, but they really aren't necessarily a fascist. you just have to remember that liberals hate socialists more than fascists

Sampatrick posted:

it is somewhat ironic for you to go on a rant about people needing to be more rational itt while at the same time being absolutely unhinged about venezuela and bringing it up in literally every conversation.

fnox posted:

If you didn't get it so wrong, I wouldn't have anything to say. But sure, let's not talk about the largest crisis going on in Latin America in the Latin America thread.

Sampatrick posted:

what was the context of the thing you quoted fnox? was it about venezuela? why do you try to make literally everything in this thread always about venezuela. if someone is talking about amlo, you will find an opportunity to make the conversation about venezuela instead. if someone is talking about chile, you will find an opportunity to make it about venezuela instead. venezuela is not the only country in latin america.

Sampatrick posted:

what was the context of the thing you quoted fnox? was it about venezuela? why do you try to make literally everything in this thread always about venezuela. if someone is talking about amlo, you will find an opportunity to make the conversation about venezuela instead. if someone is talking about chile, you will find an opportunity to make it about venezuela instead. venezuela is not the only country in latin america.

fnox posted:

You make everything about America, and you extrapolate American politics, American points of view, American history, to try and mold it into what Latin America is. You use American imperialism as a crutch to defend the sins of horrendous governments that have existed in Latin America. Such as, Venezuela's.

Sampatrick posted:

literally when

fnox posted:

You make everything about America, and you extrapolate American politics, American points of view, American history, to try and mold it into what Latin America is. You use American imperialism as a crutch to defend the sins of horrendous governments that have existed in Latin America. Such as, Venezuela's.

fnox posted:

Nah, if this was actually US government sponsored, they wouldn't send two guys. Seems like this Jordan Goudreau guy somehow roped these two guys to launch an "amphibious assault" consisting of a single peñero being sent a couple states in the wrong direction of Caracas. If the actual US military were involved, you'd see a carrier group.

The dudes who actually did land close to Caracas, in Macuto, didn't fare much better. There's pictures of the corpse of Captain Robert Colina Ibarra, alias "Panther", and it seems like his skull was crushed with a blunt object.

fnox posted:

More? How about equally?

fnox posted:

You make everything about America, and you extrapolate American politics, American points of view, American history, to try and mold it into what Latin America is. You use American imperialism as a crutch to defend the sins of horrendous governments that have existed in Latin America. Such as, Venezuela's.

ZearothK posted:

I know it is kind of fighting against a very entrenched linguistic institution, but I really dislike using America to refer to the US and American to refer exclusively to the people of the United States. It may sound petty, but it is one of the ways the Monroe Doctrine is legitimized, as language molds thought. It's like using Asian and Asia to refer exclusively to China, or European/Europe to refer to the United Kingdom and not to any of the other countries in that continent.

Not a particular shot at you, it is both widespread and established, but we can call it the US and its citizens Yanks.

ZearothK posted:

I know it is kind of fighting against a very entrenched linguistic institution, but I really dislike using America to refer to the US and American to refer exclusively to the people of the United States. It may sound petty, but it is one of the ways the Monroe Doctrine is legitimized, as language molds thought. It's like using Asian and Asia to refer exclusively to China, or European/Europe to refer to the United Kingdom and not to any of the other countries in that continent.

Not a particular shot at you, it is both widespread and established, but we can call it the US and its citizens Yanks.

Munin posted:

So to get down to brass tacks, in the Bolivian context do you deem the counting issues to be within the normal expected deviations given the limitations of the electoral system and hence most likely not inherently coup-worthy as any previous election? The OAS assessment is one datapoint, as flawed as it may be, but setting aside that mess what is your overall assessment of the situation?

Side note, the paper you linked at the bottom of your post commits the same mistake as the OAS of assuming that the "treatment group" polling stations and the "control group" polling stations should have the same underlying voter base and voting behavior. They researchers do make some good faith efforts to model the impact of voting districts having different support for the different parties but they do so by assuming that different districts in the same region have similar support for the various parties. I would compare that approach to assuming that Staten Island votes similarly to Brooklyn in New York. I could of course have missed something in their approach of course so please correct me if I did.

quote:

One explanation is that late-reporting polling stations were more likely to be from Morales strongholds. This is possible, but the real question is whether the size of the vote margins is plausible, and provides evidence to support this discontinuity in the trend line for the MAS at the 95 percent threshold. Even if the late-reporting polling stations were more likely rural areas that favored Morales, a sharp discontinuity around an arbitrary point such as the 95 percent threshold demands explanation. This last portion of the vote count, which favored Morales substantially, is not just different to earlier in the evening but also sharply different than the trend just on the other side of the 95 percent threshold.

This becomes clearer if we separate the data by Bolivia’s nine departments (departamentos) — the administrative divisions for the country’s 112 provinces. All polling stations from three departments had reported their results early in the count. In the other six departments, shown below, it is possible to consider the average polling-station-level vote share in favor of Morales before and after the 95 percent cumulative-votes-counted threshold.

In every department where there are substantial numbers of polling stations reporting late, the MAS does much better in the final 5 percent of the vote count than in the previous 95 percent. In Beni, where the two candidates are roughly even throughout the count for the first 95 percent of the cumulative vote, the MAS leaps to an average 15 percent edge in the last 5 percent. In Chuquisaca, where Mesa enjoyed an average 12 percent edge at the polling station level for the first 95 percent of the vote, this flips to a 44 percent MAS advantage on average in the last 5 percent. That’s a 50 percent average vote share reversal for the two parties! And so it goes, department after department.

It is the final 5 percent of the vote count that is critical, for here Morales’s advantage nationwide rises from just under 9 percent to 10.57 percent — this would require his advantage over Mesa to increase by around 115,000 votes. How does this happen? Well, in that final 5 percent of the vote count, Morales’s vote count grows by 167,000 votes, but Mesa’s vote count grows only by 50,000. It is this great divergence, unpredicted and unanticipated by any previous part of the election trends, that pushed Morales over the 10 percent margin to outright victory.

Squalid posted:

No, these observed irregularities are far beyond the "normal" level that are sometimes observed in Latin American elections otherwise deemed fair. The OAS and EU observers documented a number of issues that on their own might not be enough to call results into question, but taken as a whole the evidence is very substantial. For example before the election there was evidence the MAS was illegally using government resources to campaign. But whatever, that poo poo happens all the time. The really damning part is the evidence of tampering with ballots and tally sheets, the election process, the electronic security violations that made official counts unreliable, and the attempts to conceal those violations from monitors. The report literally has 500 pages of appendixes documenting these issues. Of course the remedy for that as suggested by the OAS is speedily reschedule elections and prosecute those responsible, not let wild mobs invade the Presidential palace.

If you want to see that contrasted with Bolivia's 2014 elections, you can read the OAS brief on that here.

I admit I don't really feel up to challenging the statistical assumptions of either Weisbrot or his critics. Especially because there is so much more direct evidence of fraud, even if the OAS assumptions proved false it wouldn't change the wider picture much. Accounting for autocorrelation in geographically weighted regressions can be very complicated. There may be more than one way to do it and the right way may depend on location specifics. If anyone thinks Weisbrot proved the OAS committed fraud though, its worth noting that the majority of experts who have looked at the data have come to the same conclusion as the OAS. If you want a more informed criticism of some of the CEPR arguments, here's another (from the article by the OAS auditor Irfan Nooruddin I have previously posted):

https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/yes-bolivias-2019-election-was-problematic/