Do Shifts in Late-Counted Votes Signal Fraud? Evidence from Bolivia

Peer-reviewed article by Nicolas Idrobo, Dorothy Kronick and Francisco Rodriguez, volume 84 number 4, pages 2202-2215, introducing the concept of the early-count mirage: the expectation that, absent fraud, an early advantage will persist. It characterises the mirage and evaluates fraud claims in four disputed elections, focusing on Bolivia in 2019, and concludes that the vote-share trend can be explained without invoking fraud and that the allegedly suspicious shift in late-counted votes was an artifact of methodological and coding errors on the part of electoral observers - including the OAS sorting the definitive-count timestamps alphabetically, so that 7:01 p.m. follows 7:01 a.m., rather than chronologically.