Bolivia 2019 General Election

The OAS mission recorded that the tribunal disseminated TREP figures at 19:40 on 20 October indicating a second round, then stopped disclosing preliminary results at 20:10 with more than 80% of votes counted. The OAS audit puts the freeze at 83.76% of tally sheets verified out of 89.34% already transmitted; the CEPR study, which contests the OAS conclusions, likewise records the stoppage at about 83.85% processed and notes that no clear public explanation was given. The legally binding official count continued without interruption throughout.

The OAS audit identified servers it labelled BO1 and BO20, outside the domain, administration and monitoring of tribunal staff and of the tribunal's own audit contractor, and reported that more than 1,400 tally sheets were processed through the second one after the freeze. The forensic study later commissioned by Bolivia's Attorney General reached the opposite conclusion on manipulation but confirmed the same two undeclared servers and the redirection of traffic outside the tribunal's control, as the OAS itself notes in its response to that study.

The OAS audit found no standard protocol for custody of the official tally envelope after delivery to departmental tribunals, transfers of sensitive material without police escort in several departments, and the burning of an unknown number of tally sheets and more than 13,100 voter rolls. Because a recount of ballots is not available under Bolivian procedure, the tally sheet is the only document from which the vote can be reconstructed. The CEPR study records that departmental electoral offices were attacked by protesters during the same period, destroying original material.

Law 1266 of 24 November 2019, promulgated by interim president Jeanine Anez, left the 20 October election and its results without legal effect, ended the terms of the sitting members of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, and ordered a fresh general election for the 2020-2025 term within 120 days of a new convocation. No court examined and ruled on the count itself, and the legislature elected in 2014 continued to sit until the 2020 vote.

The OAS General Secretariat concluded that willful actions were taken to alter the result and that Morales's margin over Mesa cannot be regarded as certain. Bolivia's Attorney General sought dismissal of the criminal case on 27 July 2021 after a forensic report by the University of Salamanca's BISITE Deep Tech Lab found negligence by the TREP contractor Neotec but no manipulation of the data. The OAS rejects that study on the grounds that it addressed only IT questions, was carried out remotely long after the vote by a team without electoral experience, and was financed by the office that commissioned it, while conceding that it confirms several of the audit's IT findings; the study's lead author, Juan Manuel Corchado, is quoted by the OAS as saying the work was restricted to analysing the databases. No body has since validated the 2019 count either.

The OAS audit reported a highly improbable break in trend in the final 5% of the count. A peer-reviewed reanalysis in the Journal of Politics (2022) found that the apparent sharp rise in that final segment was an artifact of sorting the timestamps alphabetically rather than chronologically, and that the shifts are consistent with ordinary counting. Escobari and Hoover, in World Development 173 (2024), separately estimate fraud of 2.51% of valid votes using the count interruption as a natural experiment; a response by the same reanalysis authors, published online in World Development in October 2025, argues that their pre-trends converge, that benign explanations exist for the simple difference and that their discontinuity cutoff is arbitrary. Both sides remain in print, and the OAS General Secretariat maintains that statistical analysis can indicate where to look but cannot by itself prove or disprove fraud.

Former members of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal were arrested and held in pre-trial detention in the case opened after the OAS audit. On 27 July 2021 Attorney General Juan Lanchipa issued a conclusive request for dismissal (requerimiento conclusivo de sobreseimiento) under Article 323(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, on the ground that the matter investigated did not constitute a crime, and placed that request before the court. The handwriting and tally-sheet findings of the OAS audit were therefore never tested in an adversarial judicial proceeding.

The CEPR study argues that the mission and the audit misrepresented the data and that the OAS was not impartial in this case, and it records that on the morning of 21 October United States Senator Marco Rubio and a State Department official for the Western Hemisphere publicly alleged that the tribunal was subverting the count, and that the United States quickly recognised Jeanine Anez as president. The study stops short of asserting that any government directed the mission's findings. The OAS General Secretariat rejects the criticism as a disinformation campaign with political objectives and says validating results is the exclusive power of the accredited national authorities. No investigation by any competent body has found that a foreign state directed the mission's findings.