General elections were held in Bolivia on 20 October 2019. Voters elected all 130 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 36 senators and cast ballots for a joint slate of president and vice president.
At the time of the elections, the Bolivian constitution limited the president and vice president to two terms, and a referendum in 2016 to amend the constitution had been rejected; the Supreme Court of Justice nonetheless ruled that all public offices would have no term limits despite what was established in the constitution, allowing the incumbent president Evo Morales to run for a fourth term. Disputes over the transparency and legitimacy of the elections prompted weeks of widespread protests in Bolivia after Morales was declared the winner with 47.08% of the vote; because this was greater than a ten-point margin over his nearest competitor, former president Carlos Mesa, this was enough for Morales to be announced as the winner without requiring a runoff second-round vote. The Organization of American States (OAS) conducted an audit claiming "clear manipulation" and significant irregularities, releasing a full report afterwards. The European Union released a report indicating that their observers found many irregularities and chaotic processes in the election. The New York Times later concluded on the basis of a new study by independent researchers and academics that the initial report was flawed as it was released too early, relied on poor datasets and used inappropriate statistical methods. The study found that there was no statistical evidence of voter fraud as the audit had claimed; OAS stood by their report but refused to disclose the full methodology and dataset.
Following protests, as well as calls for a second-round election from several foreign countries, Morales, who had pledged to respect the OAS audit, agreed on 10 November to hold new elections, at a date to be determined. Hours later he and his vice president Álvaro García Linera were forced to resign from office after losing support from the police, the Bolivian Workers' Center and the military. The president of the Senate and the president of the Chamber of Deputies – both party allies of Morales – resigned on the same day, exhausting the constitutional line of succession. As a result, the second vice president of the Senate, Jeanine Áñez of the opposition Social Democratic Movement, assumed the interim presidency of Bolivia on 12 November 2019. Due to the annulment of the 2019 elections, MAS retained their supermajority of more than two-thirds in both chambers in opposition to the government, although they would lose this in the 2020 elections.
The 2019 elections were to be rerun in May 2020, but were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On 22 June 2020, Áñez approved a law passed by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate to set a date for the election for 6 September 2020 and the elected authorities in place by mid to late November 2020.
Background
Article 168 of the 2009 constitution allows the president and vice-president to put themselves forward for re-election only once, limiting the number of terms to two. The governing party, the Movement Towards Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS–IPSP) sponsored an effort to amend this article. The referendum was authorized by a joint session of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly on 26 September 2015, by a vote of 112 to 41.
The referendum was held on 21 February 2016 and the proposed amendment was narrowly rejected by 51.3% to 48.7%. A successful 'yes' vote would have allowed President Evo Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera to run for another term in office in 2019. Morales had already been elected three times. The first time, in 2006, is not counted as it was before the two term limit was introduced by the 2009 constitution.
Despite the referendum result, the Supreme Court of Justice – referring to Art. 23 of the American Convention on Human Rights – ruled a little over one year later in December 2017 that all public offices would have no term limits despite what was established in the constitution, thus allowing Morales to run for a fourth term. Article 23 states: "Every citizen shall enjoy the following rights and opportunities: [...] to have access, under general conditions of equality, to the public service of his country."
Electoral system
The president of Bolivia is elected using a modified two-round system; a candidate wins outright if they receive more than 50% of the vote, or between 40% and 50% of the vote and are at least 10 percentage points ahead of their closest rival. If neither condition is met, a run-off election is held between the two top candidates.
The 130 members in the Chamber of Deputies (Cámara de Diputados) are elected using a seat linkage based mixed compensatory system using two votes: 63 deputies are elected by first-preference plurality to represent single-member electoral districts, 60 are elected by closed list party-list proportional representation from party lists on a departmental basis (in districts of varying sizes corresponding to Bolivia's nine departments with a threshold of 3%). The list seats in each region are awarded proportionally based on the vote for the presidential candidates, subtracting the number of single-member districts won (to provide mixed-member proportional representation). The remaining seven seats are reserved indigenous seats elected by the usos y costumbres. A voter can only vote in one of either the normal constituencies or special constituencies (coexistence). Party lists are required to alternate between men and women, and in the single-member districts, men are required to run with a female alternate, and vice versa. At least 50% of the deputies from single-member districts are required to be women.
The Chamber of Senators (Cámara de Senadores) has 36 members, four from each the country's nine departments, which are also elected using closed party-lists, using the D'Hondt method. The senate seats are also awarded based on the vote for president.
The election uses the same votes to elect the President (first round), the Chamber and the Senate, making it a double (triple) simultaneous vote. Voters may therefore not split their ticket between these elections, but they may vote for a candidate of a different list in the election of the Chamber as the deputies from the single-member districts are elected using separate votes.
Primary elections
Primary elections were held on 27 January 2019. María Eugenia Choque, President of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), stated that international observers had worked with the TSE to monitor the primary election results. She also stated that they had been given an "information seminar" about all the logistic, legal and communications issues related to the primary and had even visited polling stations to make assessments and recommendations. By the time [sic] the primary was held, however, only one candidate had been registered for each of the nine parties or alliances participating in the general elections. Morales received 36.54% of the total primary votes. Revolutionary Nationalist Movement candidate Virginio Lema was his closest challenger, receiving 7.10% of the total primary votes.
Presidential candidates
On 27 January 2019, the TSE announced that nine candidates would contest the presidential elections.
Opinion polls
First place Second place
Results
Two independent vote count processes were used for the elections. The first one, Transmisión de Resultados Electorales Preliminares (TREP), is a quick count process based on photographs that is meant to provide a preliminary result on election day. The second process is the traditional physical count that takes more time to complete.
With a preliminary vote count of 45% for incumbent president Evo Morales and 38% for his leading challenger, former president Carlos Mesa, after 83% of votes were counted, neither of the conditions for a first-round win appeared likely to be met. A second-round runoff vote between those two candidates would therefore be held on 15 December. However, no further updates to the preliminary results were made after 19:40 hours local time on election day, which caused consternation among opposition politicians and election monitors deployed by the Organization of American States (OAS); Mesa described the suspension as "extremely serious" and spoke of manipulation; the OAS requested an explanation for the pause in the publication of the vote tally. But while the vote tally was not being publicized, election staff were still observed counting votes overnight.
After the publication of the count resumed, the OAS said it observed a "drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend", and recommended a runoff election due to what the OAS viewed as manipulation.
Bolivia's Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), stated that updates to the preliminary count had been halted because the official results were starting to be released. The TSE also stated the vote had taken place normally and with relatively few incidents.
On 24 October 2019, Morales officially declared outright victory following a counting process which gave him 46.83% of the vote against Mesa's 36.7%, with only few votes remaining to be counted. Though the process was deemed controversial, Morales stated that he was still open to a second round runoff if the process later determined that he did not receive the required 10 percentage point victory margin needed in order to avoid a runoff. Cómputo Electoral concluded its counting that very same day, with final results showing Morales with 47.07% of the vote and Mesa with 36.51%. This gave Morales a victory margin of more than 10 percentage points and thus prevented a second round runoff. This was the first election since his first win in which Morales obtained less than 50% of the vote. On the morning of 25 October, the election results were made official.
Some ballots, accounting for 0.01% of the electorate, were voided in the department of Beni. A redo session was scheduled for those affected on 3 November 2019, but the electoral commission said that those votes would not change the outcome of the presidential vote. On 25 October 2019 the TSE cancelled the redo session after neither MAS nor 'Bolivia Dice No' protested the inclusion of the annulled ballots.
Controversy
The pause in results transmission for 24 hours, which took Morales from a tight race with Mesa to an outright win, was challenged by people in Bolivia and other countries, who questioned the legitimacy of the results. Protesters and opposition politicians called for a second round to be held despite Morales' lead, as did the governments of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, the United States, and the European Union. Support for the results of the election came from the governments of Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, the Non-Aligned Movement and the new President-elect of Argentina.
The day after the election the vice-president of the TSE Antonio Costas resigned, citing his disagreement with the decision to stop transmitting results. The president of the Santa Cruz Electoral Tribunal Sandra Kettels also resigned on 30 October.
After an updated vote tally was announced on Friday 25 October, including previously annulled ballots in Beni, the United Nations announced that it supported an audit of the process and results, to be carried out by the OAS. Responding to concerns about vote tampering and violent protests, Morales asked the Organization of American States (OAS) to conduct an audit of the vote count. Morales said he would call for a second-round runoff vote with Mesa if the OAS audit found evidence of fraud.
On 27 October, Morales declared that a coup d'état was in the making against his government, saying that political rivals were planning to stage a coup the following week. On 6 November, the opposition published a report stating there had been electoral fraud, including cases where MAS allegedly obtained more votes than the number of registered voters.
Results of OAS audit
On 10 November, the Organization of American States Electoral Observation Mission in Bolivia published a preliminary report of the audit conducted during the elections. The report found significant irregularities overseen by the Electoral Commission, including widespread data manipulation and altered and forged records. adding that it was statistically unlikely that Morales had secured the 10-percentage-point margin of victory needed to win outright, saying that election should be annulled after it had found "clear manipulations" of the voting system that called into question Morales' win and that "The manipulations to the computer systems are of such magnitude that they must be deeply investigated by the Bolivian State to get to the bottom of and assign responsibility in this serious case. The OAS recommended new elections and appointment of a new elections commission.
Within hours, Morales announced that fresh elections would take place. By late afternoon of that day, Morales and his vice president, Álvaro García Linera, resigned from office after losing support from the police, the military, and former political allies. Adriana Salvatierra Arriaza, the president of the Bolivian Senate, was next in the line of succession, but she too resigned from office on 10 November.
Analyses of the election
Prior to Morales's resignation
On 5 November, Professor Walter R. Mebane at the University of Michigan used his own "eforensics" model to detect and predict the level of fraud that occurred during the election. He estimated that there were between 20,450 and 24,664 fraudulent votes which were subdivided into votes that were abstentions (no votes) that were then transferred to MAS and votes that were initially for other parties but later changed to MAS. With this level of fraud, he initially determined that it would not have been enough to change the results of the elections (Morales would have had a margin of 10.16-10.27%, depending on assumptions) although on 13 November Mebane said that feedback from colleagues led him to believe that "best formula" for the model led to a new reallocation which indicated that Morales would have had a lead of 9.9% over Mesa, requiring a runoff election.