https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KzUk1tfxKw
Thursday, September 3, 2020
HUNDREDS OF LAWYERS FILE COMPLAINT AGAINST JUDGE OVER TARGETING STEVEN DONZIGER
By International Association of Democratic Lawyers.
September 2, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/hundreds-of-lawyers-file-complaint-against-judge-over-targeting-steven-donziger/
Note: The persecution of Steven Donziger deserves nationwide attention. It exposes the abuse of power by Chevron and the corruption of US courts in support of corporations. Donziger won a major case against Chevron for the widespread pollution it causes in Ecuador. After winning a more than $9 billion judgment for indigenous people in Ecuador, Chevron went after Donziger with abusive legal actions. A senior judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, abused his judicial power in support of Chevron. We interviewed Steven on Clearing The FOG radio, Steven Donziger Challenged A Corporate Polluter And Won, Now They’re Trying To Ruin Him. You will be shocked by his story and recognize the importance of his case. Donziger is a creative, aggressive fighter for the underdog against major corporate power. He has shown strong ethics and Judge Kaplan and Chevron have turned these realities upside down. – KZ
Complaint Signed By 37 Organizations Representing 500,000 Lawyers Worldwide Details Shocking Violations Of The Code Of Judicial Conduct By U.S. Judge In Long-Running Chevron Retaliation Campaign .
Chevron and Kaplan targeted Donziger after he helped Indigenous peoples win a landmark $9.5 billion judgment against the company in 2011 for dumping oil waste in the Amazon.
Dozens of legal organizations around the world representing more than 500,000 lawyers along with over 200 individual lawyers today submitted a judicial complaint documenting a series of shocking violations of the judicial code of conduct by United States Judge Lewis A. Kaplan targeting human rights lawyer Steven Donziger after he helped Indigenous peoples win a historic judgment against Chevron in Ecuador to clean up the pollution caused by decades of oil drilling with no environmental controls.
The complaint was formally filed by the National Lawyers Guild in conjunction with the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). IADL was founded in Paris in 1946 to fight to uphold the rule of law around the world and has consultative status with UN agencies.
Five pages in length with a 40-page appendix with 15 exhibits, the complaint is to be turned over to the chief judge in the federal appellate court in New York that oversees the trial court where Kaplan sits. The complaint is signed by an unprecedented number of legal organizations from approximately 80 countries collectively representing 500,000 lawyers.
The Chief Judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Robert Katzmann, has a duty to read the complaint and determine whether he will appoint a committee to investigate and issue findings.
The complaint could result in a censure of Kaplan or even his removal from the bench.
“We wrote this judicial complaint after studying the record in this case and coming to the conclusion that Judge Kaplan has been acting as a de facto lawyer for Chevron in this litigation. He has shown a shocking pattern of escalating efforts to harm Mr. Donziger for his advocacy of the rights of indigenous people in Ecuador spanning a 10-year period,” said Jeanne Mirer, the President of the IADL. “The violations constitute a clear breach of the norms set out in the judicial canon of ethics that govern the behavior of judges in the United States. We believe the complaint demands urgent investigation by Judge Katzmann to stop this pattern of abuse and to prevent a highly regarded human rights lawyer from being unjustly convicted.”
The complaint documents what its authors say is a pattern of ethics violations committed by Judge Kaplan, a former tobacco industry lawyer. Kaplan denied Donziger a jury, put in place a series of highly unusual courtroom tactics, severely restricted Donziger’s ability to mount a defense, and through his had picked judge to try him for criminal contempt has had him detained him at home for more than one year on contempt charges that were rejected by the U.S. Attorney, and allowed him to be prosecuted by a private law firm that has Chevron as a client. He also imposed enormous fines on Donziger without a jury finding that have all but bankrupted him.
The complaint alleges that the “statements and actions of Judge Kaplan over the last ten years show him to have taken on the role of counsel for Chevron … rather than that of a judge adjudicating a live controversy before him.” It added, “By these standards, he has violated his duty of impartiality under the canons of judicial conduct.”
The complaint concluded that Judge Kaplan since 2010 has “beyond all bounds of reason” tried “to destroy Steven Donziger, both personally and professionally” and “by extension has blocked the access to remedy for the 30,000 Indigenous clients from the Ecuadorian Amazon that he has represented since 1993.”
“Complainants are very concerned that the persecution of Mr. Donziger by Judge Kaplan and Chevron will have a chilling effect on the work of other human rights lawyers, acting as a warning of the consequences they will suffer should they try to hold major corporations accountable for their human rights violations,” the complaint said.
Organizations signing the complaint also include the Center for Constitutional Rights; Lawyers Committee for Human Rights; National Conference of Black Lawyers; the Confederation of Lawyers of Asia and the Pacific (including lawyers from Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Pakistan); the African Bar Association, which includes lawyers from 61 nations; and the Indian Lawyers Association, among several others. The IADL also has members from more than 50 nations.
Also signing the complaint are more than 200 individual lawyers, including Professors Charles Nesson and Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School; Marie Toussaint, a member of the European Parliament; Sarah Leah Whitson, the former Middle East Director for Human Rights Watch; Scott Badenoch, Jr., the Co-chair of the Environmental Justice Committee of the American Bar Association; and Bill Bowring, Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London.
In 2011, Donziger helped Indigenous peoples win a $9.5 billion environmental judgment against Chevron after it was found to have deliberately dumped billions of gallons of oil waste in a huge of swath of Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. Donziger represented 30,000 indigenous and local Ecuadorian communities that had been decimated by the dumping, with rates of childhood leukemia and other cancers skyrocketing. The court ruling was affirmed by six appellate courts in Ecuador and Canada, including the high courts of both countries.
As part of an avowed campaign to “demonize” Donziger, and despite accepting jurisdiction in Ecuador, Chevron came back to the United States and filed a civil “racketeering” case against the lawyer and all 47 named plaintiffs from the rainforest that potentially sought $60 billion in damages — the highest personal liability in U.S. history. The company steered the case to Judge Kaplan, who denied Donziger a jury and then let Chevron pay a witness at least $2 million while moving him and his entire family from Ecuador to the United States. Chevron lawyers coached the witness, Alberto Guerra, for 53 days before Kaplan let him testify against Donziger; Guerra later admitted under oath that he had lied repeatedly. Kaplan also refused to let Donziger testify on direct.
Prominent trial lawyer John Keker called the proceedings before Kaplan a “Dickensian farce” driven by the judge’s “implacable hostility” toward Donziger. In the meantime, 29 Nobel laureates and several human rights organizations have criticized the harassment of Donziger by judicial authorities and have demanded his immediate release.
After the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Ecuadorian plaintiffs, Judge Kaplan last year filed unprecedented criminal contempt charges against Donziger after he appealed post-judgment discovery orders to turn over to Chevron his attorney-client privileged work on his computer and cell phone. A judicial order requiring an attorney to disclose confidential work product to adversary counsel is thought to be unprecedented. That appeal is scheduled to be argued on Sept. 15 while Kaplan is trying to drive Donziger to trial on the contempt charges on Sept. 9, despite the fact Donziger’s lawyers cannot travel from out of town during the COVID-19 pandemic and not a single criminal trial has been held in the district since March.
In another unusual move, after the U.S. Attorney’s Office refused to pursue Judge Kaplan’s contempt charges the judge appointed a private law firm, Seward & Kissel LLP—which is known for its extensive financial ties to the oil and gas industry—to prosecute Donziger in the name of the government while being paid an hourly rate by taxpayers. The firm immediately pushed for Donziger’s pre-trial detention and later disclosed that Chevron was a direct client of the firm.
Donziger is now in his 13th month of home detention in a misdemeanor case where the longest sentence ever imposed on a lawyer convicted of the charge is three months of home confinement.
The judicial complaint follows the formation last week of a case monitoring committee comprised of a separate group of prominent lawyers that also has been critical of how judicial authorities in New York have treated Donziger. The committee includes Michael Tigar, chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Litigation; Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a New York Law School professor; and Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. Department of State ambassador-at-large for the Office of Global Criminal Justice.
In a news release last week announcing its formation, the committee said that “trial monitoring committees are often seen in high-profile cases around the world, but they’re most often employed in developing countries with problematic judiciaries.”
“It is unusual for a case in the United States to have such deep problems that a trial monitoring committee feels the need to attend,” said attorney Scott Badenoch, who helped organize the group.
Download the files:
Cover letter
Complaint
Appendix
Don't Believe The Polls, A People's Party, Double Standard Policing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi2JWixy3tY&ab_channel=RedactedTonight
IS THE US DELIBERATELY TRYING TO PROVOKE A MILITARY CRISIS WITH RUSSIA?
By Ted Galen Carpenter, The American Conservative.
September 2, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/is-the-us-deliberately-trying-to-provoke-a-military-crisis-with-russia/
NOTE: Sputnik News offers a different version than the one below of the recent collision between US and Russian vehicles, backed up with videos of the incident. They report the US military was blocking the Russian vehicles from passing and it was the US that ran into a Russian vehicle as it tried to pass. – MF
A dangerous vehicle collision between US and Russian soldiers in Northeastern Syria on Aug. 24 highlights the fragility of the relationship and the broader test of wills between the two major powers.
According to White House reports and a Russian video that went viral this week, it appeared that as the two sides were racing down a highway in armored vehicles, the Russians sideswiped the Americans, leaving four U.S. soldiers injured. It is but the latest clash as both sides continue their patrols in the volatile area. But it speaks of bigger problems with U.S. provocations on Russia’s backdoor in Eastern Europe.
A sober examination of U.S. policy toward Russia since the disintegration of the Soviet Union leads to two possible conclusions. One is that U.S. leaders, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, have been utterly tone-deaf to how Washington’s actions are perceived in Moscow. The other possibility is that those leaders adopted a policy of maximum jingoistic swagger intended to intimidate Russia, even if it meant obliterating a constructive bilateral relationship and eventually risking a dangerous showdown. Washington’s latest military moves, especially in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, are stoking alarming tensions.
There has been a long string of U.S. provocations toward Russia. The first one came in the late 1990s and the initial years of the twenty-first century when Washington violated tacit promises given to Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders that if Moscow accepted a united Germany within NATO, the Alliance would not seek to move farther east. Instead of abiding by that bargain, the Clinton and Bush administrations successfully pushed NATO to admit multiple new members from Central and Eastern Europe, bringing that powerful military association directly to Russia’s western border. In addition, the United States initiated “rotational” deployments of its forces to the new members so that the U.S. military presence in those countries became permanent in all but name. Even Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was uneasy about those deployments and conceded that he should have warned Bush in 2007 that they might be unnecessarily provocative.
As if such steps were not antagonistic enough, both Bush and Obama sought to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The latter country is not only within what Russia regards as its legitimate sphere of influence, but within its core security zone. Even key European members of NATO, especially France and Germany, believed that such a move was unwise and blocked Washington’s ambitions. That resistance, however, did not inhibit a Western effort to meddle in Ukraine’s internal affairs to help demonstrators unseat Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russia president and install a new, pro-NATO government in 2014.
Such provocative political steps, though, are now overshadowed by worrisome U.S. and NATO military moves. Weeks before the formal announcement on July 29, the Trump administration touted its plan to relocate some U.S. forces stationed in Germany. When Secretary of Defense Mike Esper finally made the announcement, the media’s focus was largely on the point that 11,900 troops would leave that country.
However, Esper made it clear that only 6,400 would return to the United States; the other nearly 5,600 would be redeployed to other NATO members in Europe. Indeed, of the 6,400 coming back to the United States, “many of these or similar units will begin conducting rotational deployments back to Europe.” Worse, of the 5,600 staying in Europe, it turns out that at least 1,000 are going to Poland’s eastern border with Russia.
Another result of the redeployment will be to boost U.S. military power in the Black Sea. Esper confirmed that various units would “begin continuous rotations farther east in the Black Sea region, giving us a more enduring presence to enhance deterrence and reassure allies along NATO’s southeastern flank.” Moscow is certain to regard that measure as another on a growing list of Black Sea provocations by the United States.
Among other developments, there already has been a surge of alarming incidents between U.S. and Russian military aircraft in that region. Most of the cases involve U.S. spy planes flying near the Russian coast—supposedly in international airspace. On July 30, a Russian Su-27 jet fighter intercepted two American surveillance aircraft; according to Russian officials, it was the fourth time in the final week of July that they caught U.S. planes in that sector approaching the Russian coast. Yet another interception occurred on August 5, again involving two U.S. spy planes. Still others have taken place throughout mid-August. It is a reckless practice that easily could escalate into a broader, very dangerous confrontation.
The growing number of such incidents is a manifestation of the surging U.S. military presence along Russia’s border, especially in the Black Sea. They are taking place on Russia’s doorstep, thousands of miles away from the American homeland. Americans should consider how the United States would react if Russia decided to establish a major naval and air presence in the Gulf of Mexico, operating out of bases in such allied countries as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
The undeniable reality is that the United States and its NATO allies are crowding Russia; Russia is not crowding the United States. Washington’s bumptious policies already have wrecked a once-promising bilateral relationship and created a needless new cold war with Moscow. If more prudent U.S. policies are not adopted soon, that cold war might well turn hot.
https://popularresistance.org/is-the-us-deliberately-trying-to-provoke-a-military-crisis-with-russia/
NOTE: Sputnik News offers a different version than the one below of the recent collision between US and Russian vehicles, backed up with videos of the incident. They report the US military was blocking the Russian vehicles from passing and it was the US that ran into a Russian vehicle as it tried to pass. – MF
A dangerous vehicle collision between US and Russian soldiers in Northeastern Syria on Aug. 24 highlights the fragility of the relationship and the broader test of wills between the two major powers.
According to White House reports and a Russian video that went viral this week, it appeared that as the two sides were racing down a highway in armored vehicles, the Russians sideswiped the Americans, leaving four U.S. soldiers injured. It is but the latest clash as both sides continue their patrols in the volatile area. But it speaks of bigger problems with U.S. provocations on Russia’s backdoor in Eastern Europe.
A sober examination of U.S. policy toward Russia since the disintegration of the Soviet Union leads to two possible conclusions. One is that U.S. leaders, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, have been utterly tone-deaf to how Washington’s actions are perceived in Moscow. The other possibility is that those leaders adopted a policy of maximum jingoistic swagger intended to intimidate Russia, even if it meant obliterating a constructive bilateral relationship and eventually risking a dangerous showdown. Washington’s latest military moves, especially in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, are stoking alarming tensions.
There has been a long string of U.S. provocations toward Russia. The first one came in the late 1990s and the initial years of the twenty-first century when Washington violated tacit promises given to Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders that if Moscow accepted a united Germany within NATO, the Alliance would not seek to move farther east. Instead of abiding by that bargain, the Clinton and Bush administrations successfully pushed NATO to admit multiple new members from Central and Eastern Europe, bringing that powerful military association directly to Russia’s western border. In addition, the United States initiated “rotational” deployments of its forces to the new members so that the U.S. military presence in those countries became permanent in all but name. Even Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was uneasy about those deployments and conceded that he should have warned Bush in 2007 that they might be unnecessarily provocative.
As if such steps were not antagonistic enough, both Bush and Obama sought to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The latter country is not only within what Russia regards as its legitimate sphere of influence, but within its core security zone. Even key European members of NATO, especially France and Germany, believed that such a move was unwise and blocked Washington’s ambitions. That resistance, however, did not inhibit a Western effort to meddle in Ukraine’s internal affairs to help demonstrators unseat Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russia president and install a new, pro-NATO government in 2014.
Such provocative political steps, though, are now overshadowed by worrisome U.S. and NATO military moves. Weeks before the formal announcement on July 29, the Trump administration touted its plan to relocate some U.S. forces stationed in Germany. When Secretary of Defense Mike Esper finally made the announcement, the media’s focus was largely on the point that 11,900 troops would leave that country.
However, Esper made it clear that only 6,400 would return to the United States; the other nearly 5,600 would be redeployed to other NATO members in Europe. Indeed, of the 6,400 coming back to the United States, “many of these or similar units will begin conducting rotational deployments back to Europe.” Worse, of the 5,600 staying in Europe, it turns out that at least 1,000 are going to Poland’s eastern border with Russia.
Another result of the redeployment will be to boost U.S. military power in the Black Sea. Esper confirmed that various units would “begin continuous rotations farther east in the Black Sea region, giving us a more enduring presence to enhance deterrence and reassure allies along NATO’s southeastern flank.” Moscow is certain to regard that measure as another on a growing list of Black Sea provocations by the United States.
Among other developments, there already has been a surge of alarming incidents between U.S. and Russian military aircraft in that region. Most of the cases involve U.S. spy planes flying near the Russian coast—supposedly in international airspace. On July 30, a Russian Su-27 jet fighter intercepted two American surveillance aircraft; according to Russian officials, it was the fourth time in the final week of July that they caught U.S. planes in that sector approaching the Russian coast. Yet another interception occurred on August 5, again involving two U.S. spy planes. Still others have taken place throughout mid-August. It is a reckless practice that easily could escalate into a broader, very dangerous confrontation.
The growing number of such incidents is a manifestation of the surging U.S. military presence along Russia’s border, especially in the Black Sea. They are taking place on Russia’s doorstep, thousands of miles away from the American homeland. Americans should consider how the United States would react if Russia decided to establish a major naval and air presence in the Gulf of Mexico, operating out of bases in such allied countries as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
The undeniable reality is that the United States and its NATO allies are crowding Russia; Russia is not crowding the United States. Washington’s bumptious policies already have wrecked a once-promising bilateral relationship and created a needless new cold war with Moscow. If more prudent U.S. policies are not adopted soon, that cold war might well turn hot.
Conservatives' New Talking Points - How Many Lives Are Too Many?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4B5Pl2AGXQ&ab_channel=TheBenjaminDixonShow
US POLITICAL SCIENTISTS ARGUE EVO MORALES SHOULD BE PRESIDENT OF BOLIVIA
https://popularresistance.org/us-political-scientists-argue-evo-morales-should-be-the-president-of-bolivia/
By Vijay Prashad and Manuel Bertoldi, Globetrotter.
September 2, 2020
| EDUCATE!
Three political scientists from the United States closely studied allegations of fraud in the Bolivian election of 2019 and found that there was no fraud. These scholars—from the University of Pennsylvania and Tulane University—looked at raw evidence from the Bolivian election authorities that had been handed over to the New York Times. They suggest late-counted votes came from rural regions where the candidacy of incumbent President Evo Morales Ayma was popular; the character of these votes, and not fraud, accounts for the margin of victory announced by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) on October 21, 2019.Allegations of fraud were made most sharply by the Organization of American States (OAS). It is the OAS report that is closely scrutinized by Professors Nicolás Idrobo, Dorothy Kronick, and Francisco Rodríguez, and it is found wanting on statistical and analytical grounds. If what the professors say is correct and if the OAS allegations were incorrect, then Evo Morales should have been serving his fourth term as president of Bolivia rather than be exiled to Argentina. Because Morales was removed from power by a coup d’état, his country’s democratic system is being suffocated by an interim presidency.
What Happened In October 2019
As the Idrobo, Kronick, and Rodríguez study published in July 2020 reports, at 7:40 p.m. on October 20, after the voting ended, Bolivia’s TSE paused the public transmission of the results for the election. The government had previously announced that the transmission would be paused so that the 7:50 p.m. press conference by election officials could be held in a calm manner. At this press conference, the officials said that 83 percent of the voting booths had reported to the central office, and that of these votes Morales (with 45.71 percent) was in the lead over Carlos Mesa (with 37.84 percent). The gap between the two at that point was 7.87 percent, short of the 10 percent margin needed for Morales to avoid a runoff.
The election officials did not publish any more results until the following evening; they said that they had no intention of posting any more results on October 20. On October 21, the officials said that Morales had a lead of 10.15 percent; three days later (on October 24), the Plurinational Electoral Organ announced that Morales (with 47.05 percent) had defeated Carlos Mesa (with 36.53 percent) by 10.52 percent, above the 10 percent threshold. Morales had won the election.
What The OAS Said
At 10:35 p.m., two and a half hours after the TSE held its press conference on October 20, the OAS sent out a tweet asking the TSE to explain why the transmission of results had been stopped. Here begins the mischief.
Days before the election, Bolivian authorities and their contracted firm for providing administration and support during the election—Neotec—had said that they would not be able to publish all the results on October 20 due to the lack of internet connectivity in rural parts of Bolivia. On the day of the election, Marcel Guzmán de Rojas, manager of Neotec, said that it would “take one or two more days” to confirm the official numbers; he had made this point as early as October 9. This simple explanation for the delay was not considered by the OAS or by European and U.S. ambassadors who began to whisper the phrase “election fraud” to the media.
During the break from the transmission of the results on October 20, the Panamanian cybersecurity firm Ethical Hacking that had been hired by the Bolivian government to oversee the process issued a “maximum alert” about activity on the servers. We were told by a former TSE official that Morales’ party—Movement for Socialism (MAS)—had objected to the work of Neotec, which had overseen the Bolivian elections for years; Neotec was hired to do the election five weeks before October 20 at the urging of the opposition.
The TSE brought in Ethical Hacking on September 19, 2019, just a month before the election, according to former TSE officials. The first meeting between Neotec and Ethical Hacking did not take place before October 4. The process was fraught, and any implementation was going to produce trouble. This was the backdrop to Ethical Hacking’s alert; simpler explanations—such as a lack of communication—better explain the chaos. Continued conflict into the present between Neotec and Ethical Hacking demonstrates the deep rot in the system.
Neither the timeline laid out by Neotec nor the open evidence of confusion between Neotec and Ethical Hacking entered the mainstream news. The focus was on the OAS tweet from October 20 and the OAS statement of October 21. The OAS statement spoke of its “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls.” There was nothing “hard-to-explain” if Neotec’s own timeline is taken seriously: no final numbers would be released before October 21, and the results followed the already established trendline.
The United States government (and its allies in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia) issued a statement against the election results based on the OAS report; Carlos Mesa and Luis Fernando Camacho of the Committee for Santa Cruz used the OAS claims to call the election results fraudulent. The OAS report was used as the instrument to overthrow Morales.
What The Professors Say
The day before the election, the TSE held a press conference where its president María Eugenia Choque said that the system for the transmission of election results was safe. She responded to a news report that anonymously quoted a TSE official who complained that the TSE had hired Ethical Hacking to deliberately slow the process of the transmission down. The TSE tried desperately to defend the integrity of the process, but it was already clear—as many of us knew—that the accusation of fraud was going to be used to overthrow the government of President Morales.
Two U.S. scholars from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab—Jack R. Williams and John Curiel—published a paper in February 2020 that showed no “evidence of an irregular trend.” It was clear to these scholars that the precincts that remained “to be counted already highly favored Morales.” Williams and Curiel found that after the interruption on October 20 “there was no clear change in favor of a single party.” Because of this analysis, Williams and Curiel wrote, “We find it is very likely that Morales won the required 10 percentage point margin to win in the first round of the election on October 20, 2019.”
The new paper by Idrobo, Kronick, and Rodríguez—published in July 2020—went further. It demonstrated two main points. First, building on Williams and Curiel, it argued that the precincts being counted after the pause in the transmission were largely in the highlands of Bolivia and in its rural districts, both areas that favored Morales by a landslide. “The changing composition of voting booths—rather than fraud—explains the pro-Morales shift in vote share over the reporting window,” the more recent paper stated.
Second, looking at the models used by the OAS and others, Idrobo, Kronick, and Rodríguez showed that the jumps found by the OAS were “the artifact of using an estimator not designed for regression discontinuity analysis”; in other words, the statisticians who claim fraud used the wrong analytical framework for their assessment. Looking at one precinct in the town of Llallagua, Potosí, the scholars found that “MAS’s margin increases with reporting time even before the government stopped transmitting updated results.… This is not an isolated case.”
What Morales Wanted
On November 10, 2019, Morales offered an important concession: he announced new elections that would be overseen by a new electoral body. The oligarchy and its parties smelled blood. They were uninterested in strengthening Bolivian democracy. Two hours after the announcement, the commander of Bolivia’s armed forces General Williams Kaliman—trained by the U.S. military—“suggested” that Morales resign.
Morales offered another re-election. It was rejected in place of a coup. There has been no election for a year in Bolivia since the coup.
| EDUCATE!
Three political scientists from the United States closely studied allegations of fraud in the Bolivian election of 2019 and found that there was no fraud. These scholars—from the University of Pennsylvania and Tulane University—looked at raw evidence from the Bolivian election authorities that had been handed over to the New York Times. They suggest late-counted votes came from rural regions where the candidacy of incumbent President Evo Morales Ayma was popular; the character of these votes, and not fraud, accounts for the margin of victory announced by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) on October 21, 2019.Allegations of fraud were made most sharply by the Organization of American States (OAS). It is the OAS report that is closely scrutinized by Professors Nicolás Idrobo, Dorothy Kronick, and Francisco Rodríguez, and it is found wanting on statistical and analytical grounds. If what the professors say is correct and if the OAS allegations were incorrect, then Evo Morales should have been serving his fourth term as president of Bolivia rather than be exiled to Argentina. Because Morales was removed from power by a coup d’état, his country’s democratic system is being suffocated by an interim presidency.
What Happened In October 2019
As the Idrobo, Kronick, and Rodríguez study published in July 2020 reports, at 7:40 p.m. on October 20, after the voting ended, Bolivia’s TSE paused the public transmission of the results for the election. The government had previously announced that the transmission would be paused so that the 7:50 p.m. press conference by election officials could be held in a calm manner. At this press conference, the officials said that 83 percent of the voting booths had reported to the central office, and that of these votes Morales (with 45.71 percent) was in the lead over Carlos Mesa (with 37.84 percent). The gap between the two at that point was 7.87 percent, short of the 10 percent margin needed for Morales to avoid a runoff.
The election officials did not publish any more results until the following evening; they said that they had no intention of posting any more results on October 20. On October 21, the officials said that Morales had a lead of 10.15 percent; three days later (on October 24), the Plurinational Electoral Organ announced that Morales (with 47.05 percent) had defeated Carlos Mesa (with 36.53 percent) by 10.52 percent, above the 10 percent threshold. Morales had won the election.
What The OAS Said
At 10:35 p.m., two and a half hours after the TSE held its press conference on October 20, the OAS sent out a tweet asking the TSE to explain why the transmission of results had been stopped. Here begins the mischief.
Days before the election, Bolivian authorities and their contracted firm for providing administration and support during the election—Neotec—had said that they would not be able to publish all the results on October 20 due to the lack of internet connectivity in rural parts of Bolivia. On the day of the election, Marcel Guzmán de Rojas, manager of Neotec, said that it would “take one or two more days” to confirm the official numbers; he had made this point as early as October 9. This simple explanation for the delay was not considered by the OAS or by European and U.S. ambassadors who began to whisper the phrase “election fraud” to the media.
During the break from the transmission of the results on October 20, the Panamanian cybersecurity firm Ethical Hacking that had been hired by the Bolivian government to oversee the process issued a “maximum alert” about activity on the servers. We were told by a former TSE official that Morales’ party—Movement for Socialism (MAS)—had objected to the work of Neotec, which had overseen the Bolivian elections for years; Neotec was hired to do the election five weeks before October 20 at the urging of the opposition.
The TSE brought in Ethical Hacking on September 19, 2019, just a month before the election, according to former TSE officials. The first meeting between Neotec and Ethical Hacking did not take place before October 4. The process was fraught, and any implementation was going to produce trouble. This was the backdrop to Ethical Hacking’s alert; simpler explanations—such as a lack of communication—better explain the chaos. Continued conflict into the present between Neotec and Ethical Hacking demonstrates the deep rot in the system.
Neither the timeline laid out by Neotec nor the open evidence of confusion between Neotec and Ethical Hacking entered the mainstream news. The focus was on the OAS tweet from October 20 and the OAS statement of October 21. The OAS statement spoke of its “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls.” There was nothing “hard-to-explain” if Neotec’s own timeline is taken seriously: no final numbers would be released before October 21, and the results followed the already established trendline.
The United States government (and its allies in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia) issued a statement against the election results based on the OAS report; Carlos Mesa and Luis Fernando Camacho of the Committee for Santa Cruz used the OAS claims to call the election results fraudulent. The OAS report was used as the instrument to overthrow Morales.
What The Professors Say
The day before the election, the TSE held a press conference where its president María Eugenia Choque said that the system for the transmission of election results was safe. She responded to a news report that anonymously quoted a TSE official who complained that the TSE had hired Ethical Hacking to deliberately slow the process of the transmission down. The TSE tried desperately to defend the integrity of the process, but it was already clear—as many of us knew—that the accusation of fraud was going to be used to overthrow the government of President Morales.
Two U.S. scholars from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab—Jack R. Williams and John Curiel—published a paper in February 2020 that showed no “evidence of an irregular trend.” It was clear to these scholars that the precincts that remained “to be counted already highly favored Morales.” Williams and Curiel found that after the interruption on October 20 “there was no clear change in favor of a single party.” Because of this analysis, Williams and Curiel wrote, “We find it is very likely that Morales won the required 10 percentage point margin to win in the first round of the election on October 20, 2019.”
The new paper by Idrobo, Kronick, and Rodríguez—published in July 2020—went further. It demonstrated two main points. First, building on Williams and Curiel, it argued that the precincts being counted after the pause in the transmission were largely in the highlands of Bolivia and in its rural districts, both areas that favored Morales by a landslide. “The changing composition of voting booths—rather than fraud—explains the pro-Morales shift in vote share over the reporting window,” the more recent paper stated.
Second, looking at the models used by the OAS and others, Idrobo, Kronick, and Rodríguez showed that the jumps found by the OAS were “the artifact of using an estimator not designed for regression discontinuity analysis”; in other words, the statisticians who claim fraud used the wrong analytical framework for their assessment. Looking at one precinct in the town of Llallagua, Potosí, the scholars found that “MAS’s margin increases with reporting time even before the government stopped transmitting updated results.… This is not an isolated case.”
What Morales Wanted
On November 10, 2019, Morales offered an important concession: he announced new elections that would be overseen by a new electoral body. The oligarchy and its parties smelled blood. They were uninterested in strengthening Bolivian democracy. Two hours after the announcement, the commander of Bolivia’s armed forces General Williams Kaliman—trained by the U.S. military—“suggested” that Morales resign.
Morales offered another re-election. It was rejected in place of a coup. There has been no election for a year in Bolivia since the coup.
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