On unfounded claims of electoral fraud

Peer-reviewed response by Nicolas Idrobo, Dorothy Kronick and Francisco Rodriguez to the Escobari and Hoover fraud estimate, accepted 28 July 2025 and published online on 25 October 2025 in World Development as article 107155 (print issue volume 198, dated 2026). It argues that the pre-trends are converging in the difference-in-differences, that many benign explanations exist for the simple difference, and that the regression discontinuity uses an arbitrarily chosen cutoff at which placebo outcomes are not smooth. It also states that the sharp rise the OAS final report displayed in the last 5% of the definitive count was an artifact of a coding error in which timestamps were sorted alphabetically rather than chronologically, so that 7:01 p.m. followed 7:01 a.m., and that the 95% cutoff the OAS studied corresponds to no known event in the count.