Ecuador's Guillaume Long: "In Bolivia OAS Could Not Develop a Theory of Electoral Fraud"

January 17, 2020 Fraud not proven, Guillermo Long, Interview, oas
Interview with Guillaume Long, former chancellor of Ecuador

By Pedro Brieger – Director of NODAL

The Center for Research in Economics and Politics (CEPR) denounced the Organization of American States (OAS) for not presenting evidence that there has been fraud in the elections of Bolivia since the investigation of the successive reports of the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE) of the OAS and then the audit of the agency itself in that country. An exhaustive CEPR final report on the OAS electoral observation in the Bolivian presidential elections of October 20 will be published in the next few days.

To analyze the NODAL report, we interviewed Guillaume Long, a researcher at the CEPR in Washington DC, a “think tank” with a long history in the study of economic and social policies in Latin America. Long was chancellor during the government of former President of Ecuador Rafael Correa (2007-2017), as well as Minister of Culture and Heritage and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. In 2018 he resigned as ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva for his deep disagreements with the Lenin Moreno government.

CEPR, a Washington-based think tank in which you work, has insisted since the end of October 2019 that the findings of the OAS Electoral Observation Mission in Bolivia have been problematic and that the OAS has not presented evidence of fraud In the elections. CEPR said that “the final audit of the OAS does not prove – it does not even argue convincingly – that the results of the elections were manipulated.” Why does the CEPR make this complaint and when did they begin to doubt the suitability of the electoral observation carried out by the OAS?

Undoubtedly, the element that aroused our initial suspicion was the press release of the OAS Electoral Observation Mission (MOE) of October 21, the day after the election. We were surprised by the tone of the statement: aggressive, without any technical element, but calling for the will of the electors to be respected and insinuating that there was something fraudulent. The only element communicated by the MOE was an alleged “change in trend” of the election results, after the interruption of the TREP [preliminary vote count] with 84% of the votes counted. Then we began to study whether this “change of trend” had really taken place. We were able to show that there was no change in trend from the beginning,

Can you explain what you mean when you say there was no change in trend?

It is very simple. With 83.85% of the preliminary count, Morales was 7.9 points ahead of Carlos Mesa, that is an insufficient difference to win without a second round. But with 95% of the preliminary count, Morales had exceeded the threshold of 10 points to win in the first round. [in Bolivia, presidential elections can be won in the first round if a candidate has reached 50% of the votes, or 40% with 10 points of difference with the next candidate]. The difference is explained because there was a lack of counting a large number of votes in areas where there were already very favorable voting trends for Evo Morales. It was obvious that, when entering those votes, the difference between both candidates was going to be enlarged.

More:
https://orinocotribune.com/ecuadors-guillaume-long-in-bolivia-oas-could-not-develop-a-theory-of-electoral-fraud/?fbclid=IwAR37Ol-E696oDjtcOOVLvGFfFz4h5oI8TS5jvZbQA6TWq9ZsKI6LszI3zRA