06 September 20
Epitaph: Where Once RSN Existed
There are no guarantees in this life. Right now we have a vibrant publication with a voice for social justice. To ensure that RSN continues I am entrusted to raise enough funding to meet the organization’s obligations.
It falls to me, and to you.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
05 September 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Robert Reich | Just Like His Boss, Attorney General William Barr Is Ratcheting Up the Conspiracy Theories
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
Excerpt: "Just like his boss, Attorney General William Barr is ratcheting up the conspiracy theories and propaganda as the election nears. It was nearly impossible to keep up with every one of the false claims Barr made in an interview with CNN yesterday."
He claimed widespread mail-in voting is “very open to fraud and coercion,” despite decades of evidence showing it is safe and secure. He doubled down on the conspiracy theory that foreign entities will interfere with mail-in voting, and when pressed on his claim, admitted that he had no evidence to back it up and that he was “basing it on logic.” He also downplayed Russia’s well-documented and far-reaching efforts to help Trump in both the 2016 election and our current one, despite intelligence officials’ repeated warnings that Russia has already begun to meddle again.
In addition to those lies, Barr also made a series of baseless claims regarding the Black Lives Matter movement and the historic protests against racial injustice and police killings. He claimed the police shooting of Jacob Blake was justified because Blake was armed; there is no evidence that Blake was armed. He asserted that systemic racism in policing is “simply a false narrative,” despite multiple studies finding that Black Americans are far more likely to be shot by police than white Americans. And he even backed up Trump’s conspiracy theory that members of the anti-fascist movement travel around the country attending protests and stirring up violence, without offering a shred of evidence to support his claim.
One thing is clear: Bill Barr’s only job these days is to do Trump’s bidding and back him up no matter what. When we vote Trump out in November, we vote out William Barr, too. It’s a win-win.
Families participate in a children's march in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and national protests against police brutality in New York City. (photo: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
Nearly All Black Lives Matter Protests Are Peaceful Despite Trump Narrative, Report Finds
Lois Beckett, Guardian UK
Beckett writes: "The vast majority of the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests this summer have been peaceful, with more than 93% involving no serious harm to people or damage to property, according to a new report tracking political violence in the United States."
READ MORE
Dora Rodriguez by her home in Tucson, Arizona, on March 13, 2020. (photo: Kitra Cahana/MAPS)
"There Is No Mercy": As the Coronavirus Descended on the Border, the Trump Administration Escalated Its Crackdown on Asylum
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "Short walk from the border, in the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora, sits a modest building packed with long, cafeteria-style tables."
READ MORE
Clay Higgins. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
GOP Congressman Threatens to Shoot Armed Protesters in Unhinged Facebook Post
Paul Blest, VICE
Blest writes: "Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, a former SWAT cop who's big on gun rights, threatened to shoot protesters in a wildly deranged Facebook post that accompanied a picture of armed Black men."
When Facebook took down the post, Rep. Clay Higgins posted a picture of an American eagle and whined that his liberty was under attack.
“Look, fair warning. If this shows up, we’ll consider the armed presence a real threat. We being, We, the people of Louisiana,” Higgins’ post began. The Republican congressman, elected in 2016, went on to say, “I wouldn’t even spill my beer. I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand. Because some of we, like me…We, are SWAT. Nothing personal. We just eliminate the threat.”
The accompanying picture, taken during a rally in Louisville to protest Breonna Taylor’s killing earlier this year, shows three heavily armed Black men from the Not Fucking Around Coalition, an all-Black militia.
Facebook removed the post for violence and incitement, a company spokesperson told The Acadiana Advocate on Tuesday. In a follow-up post responding to the removal, Higgins posted a picture of an American eagle, whined that his liberty was under attack, and suggested we’re in a war.
“Welcome to the front lines, Ladies and Gentlemen. I suggest you get your mind right,” Higgins wrote. “I’ll advise when it’s time to gear up, mount up, and roll out.”
Higgins, a right-wing former member of the Opelousas Police Department’s SWAT team, resigned from the department in 2007 rather than face a demotion and suspension for unnecessarily slapping a man in custody and lying about it, a 2017 investigation by IND Monthly found.
Higgins later rose to prominence as a police spokesperson for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office, frequently appearing on a local television station’s “Crime Stoppers” segments. After Higgins was heavily criticized for a video he filmed saying alleged criminals would be “hunted” and “trapped,” he resigned from the job, saying he’d “rather die than sacrifice my principles.”
Since his election to Congress, Higgins has frequently touted his hard-line interpretation of the Second Amendment. “Every American that can legally possess and own a weapon, and carry in whatever manner, should have that protection in every state across the nation,” Higgins said in a 2017 statement following a vote on a bill allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons across state lines.
It’s unclear why Higgins even posted this, considering the NAFC is nowhere near Louisiana. On the other hand, dozens of heavily armed members of the far-right Louisiana Cajun Militia did show up to a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in Lafayette on Tuesday night, the Advocate reported. Though interactions between the militia and protesters were peaceful, according to reports, one member told a reporter that his group wasn’t “gonna let [Black Lives Matter] protesters go around burning flags and intimidating.”
Higgins hasn’t said yet whether those armed men constituted a “real threat.”
Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: B&T)
Facebook Said It Removed a Militia Event Page Threatening Violence in Kenosha. It Didn't.
Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "Sandra Fiehrer thought she was helping Facebook enforce its own rules when she reported 'Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property,' an event being organized on the social network for the evening of Aug. 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin."
Despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s previous statements that the company had removed a militia event where people discussed gathering in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to shoot and kill protesters, the company never took any such action, BuzzFeed News has learned. The event was taken down by the militia group itself after two people were killed.
Here’s how Facebook failed Kenosha.
The event, which was created by the Kenosha Guard, a self-proclaimed militia group, had hundreds of RSVPs by the time Fiehrer came across it and was already a hotbed of raucous discussion. Members discussed plans to bring guns to 900 57th St. in Kenosha, defend public property, and potentially attack people protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
“I fully plan to kill looters and rioters tonight,” one person wrote on the event page, according to screenshots seen by BuzzFeed News. “I have my suppressor on my AR [rifle], these fools won’t even know what hit them.”
“When the shooting starts, make sure that somebody is sending a live feed of the mother fuckers going down,” said another.
“I had a bad feeling about it,” Fiehrer, who volunteers for Moms Demand Action, a gun safety nonprofit, told BuzzFeed News. She said she had seen similar militia groups stoke fear and hatred in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. The day before the event, she filed a complaint with Facebook about the page “inciting violence,” hoping the social network would take swift action.
But Facebook allowed the event page and the Kenosha Guard page to remain on its platform despite newly instituted policies banning militia groups. On Tuesday the 25th, Fiehrer watched in horror as civil unrest led a 17-year-old gunman, who spent part of the evening with members of an unidentified militia, to allegedly shoot and kill two protesters and wound another. Later that evening Facebook responded to her complaint: “This event was reviewed ...it doesn’t go against one of our specific Community Standards.”
Fiehrer’s complaint was one of the 455 sent to Facebook warning of a militia event violating the company’s policies. Together, they inspired four manual and numerous automated reviews of the event page by Facebook’s content moderators, which all concluded it did not violate the company’s rules. CEO Mark Zuckerberg would later tell employees it was “an operational mistake.” In those same remarks, which were made public after being reported by BuzzFeed News, Zuckerberg suggested to employees that the company had removed the event and militia page from the platform the next day.
But internal company discussions obtained by BuzzFeed News show that’s not true. The event was actually deleted the day after the shooting, not by Facebook, but by a page administrator for the Kenosha Guard. Later that day, Facebook removed the Kenosha Guard page itself.
Interviews with Facebook users and employees, never-before-published comments from the Kenosha Guard’s event page, and internal company documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal that the company’s handling of the events in Kenosha wasn't so much an “operational mistake” as it was a total failure to take action.
“The fact that Facebook took credit publicly for removing the event page shows Facebook is more concerned with reputation management than product safety,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “The vengeful posts on the Kenosha Guard’s event page are not an isolated case though. As I search through hundreds of pro-gun groups, the comments are rife with people fantasizing about becoming vigilantes and sharing Dirty Harry memes.”
“Facebook didn’t just fail Kenosha; it continues to fail us all when they don’t exhibit the moral faculties and technical readiness to prevent this tragedy and the next one,” she added.
Responding to questions from BuzzFeed News, Facebook said it had incorrectly claimed it had removed the event page.
“When we responded to questions about our initial investigation into what happened in Kenosha, we believed we'd removed the Event Page for violating our policies,” Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “Our investigation found that while we did remove the Kenosha Guard Page, the Event was removed by the organizer. We apologize for the error."
Facebook said the alleged shooter was not a follower of the Kenosha Guard Facebook page and did not RSVP to the “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property” event. But area residents who spoke to BuzzFeed News wondered whether he would have gone to Kenosha were it not for militia groups like the Kenosha Guard calling for people to do so.
Jordan, a 33-year-old mother who lives in Wisconsin and asked that her full name not be used for fear of retaliation, reported the Kenosha Guard group page before the shooting. She dismissed Facebook’s claim that the gunman had no connection to the Kenosha Guard or its event page, noting that it’s easy to be aware of and attend Facebook events without RSVPing to them via the social network. The event was public and could be viewed by anyone.
“The shooter knew there would be others with guns in the area,” she said.
And as Fiehrer noted, what really matters is not that the shooter was inspired by the Kenosha Guard’s call to arms, but rather that the Kenosha Guard was able to issue such a public call, and host violent threats, without consequence.
“If that doesn’t violate rules, my question is: What does?” she asked. “They should be taking action against it before people get killed, not after.”
“Take Up Arms”
According to Facebook’s rules, the Kenosha Guard page should not have been allowed on the social network. An Aug. 19 update to the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy explicitly forbids US-based militia organizations that “have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behavior.”
Still, the Kenosha Guard page continued to operate, amassing more than 3,000 likes as a “social club” as of late August, according to screenshots provided to BuzzFeed News by nonprofit news organization Wisconsin Watch.
So when a Guard page administrator reportedly sent out a call to arms around 10:44 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 25, urging people to “take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs,” the message reached plenty of people. It was promptly followed by an event invitation called “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property,” according to a timeline outlined by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. The event gathered additional momentum after Alex Jones’ conspiracy site InfoWars featured it in a story.
Late Tuesday afternoon, hours before the 17-year-old gunman allegedly shot three people, Liz Lahue, a bartender in Illinois, visited the Kenosha Guard’s Facebook event page and began reporting violent comments.
“People were just talking about violence for no reason,” she told BuzzFeed News.
“Do not let these protestors get close to you. Just keep them in line if they’re protesting, but if they are rioting and destroying things … pew pew pew time,” wrote one person on the event page, making a thinly veiled reference to gunshots.
“Start laying lead down, they will get the point eventually,” said another. “There is only one punishment by law for treason,” wrote still another, referring to the death penalty.
Lahue reported several comments to Facebook, including some by a man who made multiple death threats against protesters, and who later threatened her on the event page. The company rejected all of her complaints. It’s not clear if they were included in or additive to the 455 reports filed about the event page, as Facebook declined to answer that question.
As the night wore on and protesters flooded the streets of Kenosha, the Kenosha Guard page became an organizational hub. People posted their locations, the type of firearms they were carrying, offers of backup, and bogus claims of inbound rioters.
“Could someone drop me a location on where the heavy dense fighting area is?”
“Vet here with quite a few people to help and all the equipment we need. We can take one of the more dangerous areas.”
“ATTENTION!! I received a call from my neighbors both of who [sic] are police officers. They told me that a caravan full of rioters are headed to Salem and Paddock Lake.”
Some people urged caution and warned of deadly consequences. “I’m concerned that most of the people involved in this group are untrained civilians. Once they get scared someone’s getting shot.”
At 10:38 p.m., after reading what she described as obvious “calls to violence,” Jordan, the mother from Wisconsin, reported the event to Facebook.
At that point, the 17-year-old gunman had already been filmed on a livestream standing in front of a car dealership with unidentified members of a militia. “Our job is to protect this business,” he told a video producer with the Daily Caller. After a skirmish at roughly 11:45 p.m., the teen allegedly shot three people, killing two and wounding another.
Jordan didn’t see the news until the next morning. At approximately the same time, she received a notification from Facebook saying the group had not violated any of the social network’s community standards.
“This Is Not True”
After the shootings, chatter on the Kenosha Guard event page took on a celebratory tone.
“Tried to attack business owners, got their azzes shot off. MORE please… this needs to happen a LOT MORE,” wrote one man.
“1 protester dead got shot in the head… then they tried to attack the guy and a couple more got shot. Gotta love it,” wrote a man who was labeled by Facebook’s automated system as a “Top Fan” in the group due to his frequent posting.
The comments continued to flow in the hours after the shooting. Danielle, a woman who lives near Milwaukee, checked the event page around 3 a.m. and found a mix of people justifying the killings and others mocking the militia members.
“There were some people already justifying the shooting when at that point it really was very unclear what had actually happened, who was at fault,” she said.
Early Wednesday morning, a person running the Kenosha Guard Facebook account posted a statement about the shooting. They said they were “unaware if the armed citizen was answering the Kenosha Guard Militia’s call to arms,” adding that “we need all the facts and evidence to come out before we make a judgement.”
Sometime after noon on Wednesday the Kenosha Guard’s Facebook page and associated event were gone. That evening, an internal communications manager at Facebook, posted a note to the company’s internal message board updating employees about an investigation into the matter.
Facebook had “designated the shooting as a mass murder,” the manager explained, noting that the company had deactivated the shooter’s Instagram and Facebook accounts. “Separate from the shooting however, the Kenosha Guard Page and their Event Page violated our new policy addressing militia organization and have been removed on that basis,” she added. That information turned out to be partly false.
On Thursday, during a companywide meeting that can be viewed by all of Facebook’s more than 50,000 employees, Zuckerberg also seemed to credit Facebook for the removal of the Kenosha Guard’s “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property” event. “There have been a bunch of media reports asking why this page and event weren’t removed sooner,” Zuckerberg said. Calling it an “operational mistake,” he blamed moderators who were unfamiliar with Facebook’s new policy on militias. “On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated our policies and we took it down,” he said.
But it wasn’t Facebook that deactivated the event page. It was the Kenosha Guard itself. And some employees knew it.
“I’m not sure why our external and internal comms have claims that we removed the Kenosha Guard event,” one staffer wrote on Workplace, Facebook’s employee-only message board. “This is not true: the event was user deleted hours before we disabled the owning page. I’m not sure where the mixup happened, but this is a pretty important distinction.”
“We Are Making the World Worse”
In the days following Zuckerberg’s all-hands address, Facebook’s handling of the Kenosha Guard incident continued to rankle employees already frustrated by the company’s handling of issues around racial justice.
In other posts to Workplace, employees challenged company leadership to explain why the Kenosha Guard page and event were allowed on Facebook at all. Others posted example after example of Facebook and Instagram posts celebrating the shooter, despite Zuckerberg’s public commitment to eliminate such content.
One employee asked why a meme showing one of the victims of the shooting overlaid with text that read “Don’t be a thug if you can’t take a slug” had been ruled non-violative by Facebook’s human moderators. “Shouldn’t this be part of our zero tolerance policy?” they asked.
Another worker asked the same question about a racist comment disparaging Black people as “uneducated druggies” who are “killing their own kids.”
“This is such flagrant and uncoded racism that I’m baffled that I even need to [flag it],” they wrote. “In no uncertain terms: we are making the world worse by allowing content like this to exist in our platform.”
Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and the author of Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, said Facebook’s outsourcing of the critical function of moderation affords it an easy way to shift blame to contractors when things go wrong.
“Here we have the CEO who's sitting at the top of this incredibly lucrative and immeasurably powerful firm with a product used by billions of people, and [he’s blaming] unnamed, unknown people probably working somewhere very far away from Kenosha, Wisconsin,” she told BuzzFeed News. “Whereas there's absolutely no responsibility being taken by him.”
A former Facebook moderator, who worked for a third-party contractor called Cognizant in Phoenix, called Zuckerberg’s operational error remark and attempt to blame moderators “ludicrous.” Having served as a moderator for Facebook during the 2018 Parkland mass shooting, he said it’s difficult to keep up with the social media giant’s shifting moderation expectations and rules.
“Even if there was training, people need experience — practical experience over a period of time before it’s really effective,” he said. “Who is really to say what’s a militia and what is not a militia?”
Some of his colleagues were woefully underprepared, the former moderator said, and often questioned Facebook’s guidelines.
Content moderation isn’t just an issue on Facebook’s public-facing platform; it’s also becoming a challenge on the company’s internal Workplace message boards. In the aftermath of the Blake shooting, one employee published a now-deleted post asking colleagues to show their “Support For Law Enforcement” writing, “mourning the death of those who serve our communities does not mean supporting injustice by anyone in society.”
The following day, in a post first reported by the Daily Beast, another worker asked his colleagues on Workplace to consider the “well-intentioned law enforcement officers who have been victimized by society’s conformity to a lie.”
“Law enforcement has no moral obligation to allow non-compliant criminals to put officers lives in danger,” he wrote. “FBI data confirms that law enforcement is disproportionally more likely to be killed than the other way around.” (The poster did not include any data to back up this claim.)
“What if racial, economic, crime, and incarceration gaps cannot close without addressing personal responsibility and adherence to the law?” they added.
In the top-voted comment responding to the post, one Facebook staffer called the note “openly racist.”
“Saying that economic disparities are due to a lack of ‘personal responsibility’ is openly racist,” they wrote. “This post is shameful.”
Earlier this week, the debate continued, with one Facebook staffer asking if the company would reverse its decision to remove the alleged shooter’s Facebook and Instagram accounts if it were proven that he was acting in self-defense.
By labeling the gunman “an attempted mass shooter and banning users who support him, are we not pre-deciding his guilt?” the employee wrote, comparing the situation to George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin, or Bernard Goetz, the vigilante who shot four Black men on a New York City subway in 1984. “It does not seem prudent to position the company firmly on one side of a brewing national debate, just as it begins, particularly when there is a non-zero chance his actions may yet be deemed lawful.”
His “criminal guilt will be [determined in court],” one colleague responded. “In the meantime we can prevent additional harm from coming to people by keeping those will [sic] kill multiple people with AR-15s off our platform.”
Such internal vitriol has forced Zuckerberg to more aggressively wrangle outspoken employees and introduce new moderation policies. Last month he threatened to fire those who violated the company’s respectful conduct policies and bullied others. On Monday, he sent a note to employees saying that “systemic racism is real” and that the company is taking steps to “better manage discussions in our workplace.”
“The direction we’re headed is to have dedicated spaces on Workplace for discussing charged topics, with clear rules and strong moderation,” he wrote. “That means you won’t be able to post highly charged content broadly in open groups.”
On Thursday, Zuckerberg was scheduled to address employees at the company’s weekly all-hands meeting. Had he done so, internal polls reviewed by BuzzFeed News show he would have faced tough questions about Kenosha and Facebook being used as a platform for radicalization. Late Wednesday, however, Facebook canceled the meeting.
Employees still had the option to gather for another previously scheduled event on Thursday: a talk by Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. ●
An Evo Morales supporter confronts Bolivian police in La Paz. (photo: Natacha Pisarenko/AP)
The OAS Accusation of Electoral Fraud Against Evo Morales Is Bullshit - and Now We Have the Data to Prove It
David Rosnick, Jacobin
Rosnick writes: "The day after the Bolivian election, the Organization of American States suggested the result was fraudulent - then took months to provide any proof. Last month, it finally released its data - and researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found a basic coding error that destroys the OAS's case against Morales."
ugust 20 was a day that shook a small world of scientists that had all but given up — short of legal threats — on getting a glimpse into the data and methods behind the analyses that took down the Bolivian government. Slowed by stonewalling and gaslighting, researchers had managed to re-create some — but not all — of the results presented by the Organization of American States (OAS) in its case against the legitimacy of Evo Morales’s reelection last October 20.
The OAS had alleged, the day after the vote, that the preliminary count contained an “inexplicable change in trend” of the preliminary results — drastically skewing in Morales’s favor. But its claim was dubious to begin with. As early as October 22, we began raising serious questions suggesting the “inexplicable change” was quite predictable.
The OAS would later support its allegation by claiming that the official count also contained a late break for Morales that “cannot be easily explained away” by Morales’s generally rural support specifically because the official count “data do not reflect the time the results were reported to the TSE [Tribunal Supremo Electoral].” This premise is entirely wrong; votes from the main cities were much more likely to be counted early, because the official count required hand delivery (rather than electronic transmission) of electoral materials to TSE offices.
Faulty reasoning aside, the OAS results were irreproducible.
Ten months later came the revelation that some of the OAS’s previously baffling conclusions are explained by a coding error. It had ordered the time stamps on the tally sheets alphabetically rather than chronologically — thus destroying its narrative of a sudden change in the official count.
Unjustly Forced Out
The damage, of course, had already been done. On November 11, 2019, Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales — his term not yet complete — stepped down from the presidency amid allegations of fraud. Decisive was the report from the OAS, which had just presented its preliminary findings in a binding audit of the October 20 election. These findings were not favorable to Morales, questioning his official first-round victory.
Members of the opposition, some of whom had been saying all along that Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS-IPSP) party would attempt fraud to stay in power, took to the streets in violent protest. Though Morales agreed to annul the election, the head of the military told him he should step down. He resigned and embarked on a dramatic flight from Bolivia to Mexico — barely making it out alive, according to the Mexican foreign minister.
This isn’t the first time the OAS has deployed poor statistics to overturn election results. In 2010, the OAS intervened in Haiti, demanding that the third-place candidate be permitted to participate in a runoff election with the first-place candidate — leaving the runner-up, who just happened to be the only non-right-wing candidate, out in the cold.
To be sure, security surrounding Bolivia’s election was insufficient. At the risk of whataboutism, the same could be said of most any election in the United States. However, the OAS’s findings presented in November were otherwise full of insinuation and short on detail. The OAS presented no actual evidence that even a single vote was altered. Instead, it offered a statistical analysis that statistician Andrew Gelman characterizes as “a joke.”
Convenient Conclusions, Dodgy Assumptions
Even if the approach was dubious and the results were irreproducible, at least it presented something. The OAS press release the day after the vote had presented no such analysis — though it certainly did raise the volume of opposition protests. Amid cries of “fraud,” prominent members of Morales’s party and their families were assaulted or threatened with murder. Jeanine Áñez’s “interim” government — still in power today, having three times delayed new elections— would later cite the OAS reports as its near-exclusive evidence in its campaign to dismantle MAS.
Despite repeated requests, the OAS offered no justification for their claims. This, even though the results seemed in line with pre-election polls. With the preliminary count 84 percent complete, Morales had received more than 45 percent of the valid votes in a nine-way race. Yet under Bolivian electoral law, this would not be enough to win the race outright: only if he had an absolute majority, or a 10-point lead over runner-up Carlos Mesa, would Morales avoid a second-round runoff.
Morales’s lead increased steadily as the preliminary count had progressed. This offered no particular reason to think anything was odd. Rather, tally sheets from areas supportive of Morales have tended to be counted later than tally sheets from areas favorable to the opposition, and that was the case in this election. Imagine first counting votes from Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC, before considering rural Texas, Tennessee, or Alabama. Nobody would be surprised that the inclusion of Republican areas in the count would steadily chip away at the early Democratic lead.
Shortly before the announcement of partial, unofficial, preliminary results on the evening of October 20, there was a surge of votes counted from Santa Cruz — a hotbed of anti-Morales sentiment that dented the nearly constant good news for the incumbent president. In any case, the tally sheets that remained to be counted were coming from areas that had already shown, on balance, a strong preference for Morales. When the rapid count paused with 84 percent of votes counted, Morales’s lead over Mesa was only about 8 percentage points. Yet when the preliminary results were next reported, a day later, with another 9 percent of the vote, Morales had (tentatively) a 10-point lead — and his first-round victory.
Was this victory inexplicable — constructed in the darkness — as the OAS suggested? Was it a change of fate, or inevitable? My colleague Jake Johnston quickly put together an analysis of the results in the capital city of Cochabamba, where the swing was particularly visible. Breaking down the results by precinct, Jake showed that there was very little change in Morales’s support before and after the interruption of the count; in large part, Morales performed better, late, in Cochabamba, because precincts more favorable to the incumbent were — for whatever reason — counted later. A more rigorous approach over the entire election suggested by John Newman would show likewise: in the locality of Cochabamba, Morales actually underperformed late when the mix of precincts is taken into account.
So it went for the whole election. Consistently, studies have shown that once the different composition of precincts before and after the interruption is accounted for, Morales’s victory was predictable.
The OAS Final Audit
The OAS analyses have been notable for a steadfast refusal to consider such intra-geographic differences, presuming — contrary to all evidence — that a candidate’s support should be more or less uniform throughout the count.
The OAS final audit report on December 4 was explicitly biased in casting doubt on Morales’s first-round victory. The audit team expressly looked for irregularities on tally sheets that heavily favored Morales — justifying this selective search based on alleged statistical evidence that Morales’s victory was “inexplicable.” However, the statistical evidence presented in the OAS audit was not merely unconvincing; the analysis was completely wrong. The analysis boiled down to two points.
First, the OAS argued that the last 5 percent of the vote in the unofficial, preliminary count showed “a striking upward trend . . . that is quite different.” However, it is not unusual for late swings in a count to prove decisive. As noted in an open letter by economists and statisticians:
It is not uncommon for election results to be skewed by location, which means that results can change depending on when different areas’ votes get counted. No one argued that there was fraud in Louisiana’s 16 November gubernatorial election, when the Democratic candidate John Bel Edwards, pulled out a 2.6% point victory, after being behind all night, because he won 90% of the vote in Orleans county, which came in at the end of the count.
The order in which preliminary results were reported publicly was slightly different than the order in which Irfan Nooruddin (the author of the OAS statistical analyses) considers them. Many tally sheets throughout the count were transcribed but set aside for later approval. Those approved at the end tended to be much more representative of the entire election— even unfavorable to Morales. Regardless, the upward trend in Nooruddin’s data was predictable based on the earlier data, because his late tally sheets came from areas that had overwhelmingly shown strong support for Morales.
Second, Nooruddin argued that this finding is bolstered by the fact that the last 5 percent of the vote in the official count was also inconsistent with the previous 95 percent and again the penultimate 5 percent. Specifically, the OAS presented graphs showing that Morales’s vote share increased sharply after the 95 percent mark, while Mesa’s plummeted.
But these results were completely irreproducible. Until August 19.
Breakthrough
For weeks following the release of the OAS report, researchers had tried unsuccessfully to replicate these findings using publicly available data. The OAS ignored requests for its data and explanation of its methods, but there were two red flags suggesting that its analysis suffered from serious errors. First, the OAS concluded its audit with the results of an “internal analysis” that directly contradicted the graphs. That table implied that Morales performed better — not worse — over the penultimate 5 percent than the last 5. Second, the table above it broke down results by select departments (equivalent to states in the United States). None of these numbers seemed to make sense.
This was not a simple difference between public and official, internal data. On May 25, I finally received data direct from the TSE; again, Cochabamba was counted entirely before the 95 percent mark.
The breakthrough came only on August 19. That was when Nooruddin posted his data set to a Harvard repository. Sorting tally sheets by this progress variable, everything looks fine to start with. But the transition from the October 20 to October 21 stands out.
Shortly before Nooruddin claims the count reaches 11 percent, the time stamps jump from 11:59 p.m. to 01:00 a.m. Was it possible there was an hour break? No. There were tally sheets time-stamped at 12:00 a.m. on the 21st, but they were far down the list — just past the 61 percent mark, immediately between those time-stamped 11:59 p.m. and the tally sheets time-stamped 12:00 p.m.
It was clear what Nooruddin had done. His time stamps were formatted as strings — letters and numbers; when he sorted his tally sheets, he did so alphabetically and not chronologically. Nooruddin had each day starting at 01:00 a.m., proceeding to 01:00 p.m., 01:01 a.m., and so forth until 12:59 a.m. and finally concluding at 12:59 p.m.
The OAS’s claims against the legitimacy of the election results originally centered on what it considered to be an inexplicable change in the trend of the votes over time. But Nooruddin’s analyses reflect no real-world understanding of the order in which tally sheets were counted. His “first 95 percent” included tally sheets as late as 10:55 p.m. on October 22, but his “last 5 percent” included tally sheets as early as 12:19 a.m. — hours earlier. Sorting tally sheets chronologically, Nooruddin’s progress variable is all over the place.
Resisting Scrutiny
The fact is, the OAS still is not used to this kind of scrutiny, since it usually breezes through it with an air of authority. Like others empowered by this false sense of security, the OAS again doubled down on its defense of the study. On Twitter, Gerardo de Icaza — director of OAS election observations — praised Nooruddin as “one of the best electoral statisticians in the world” and insisted falsely that his results held.
Such has been the consistent pattern of the OAS in response to any criticism of their report: when data fails them, they simply ignore the evidence and lash out. When the New York Times arranged for several academics to evaluate the statistical evidence and published their finding that Nooruddin’s presentation was erroneous, secretary general of the OAS Luis Almagro dispatched a wild attack on the NYT. Others with influence inside the Washington, DC, beltway, such as the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch’s Americas director, José Miguel Vivanco, have taken notice of Almagro’s increasingly erratic behavior.
The OAS secretary general has caught even the attention of the Washington Office on Latin America, which has long been critical of many of Latin America’s left-leaning governments. Almagro recently undermined the independence of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — the OAS’s autonomous human rights arm — by unilaterally standing in the way of the continuation of Paulo Abrão’s term as executive secretary. The Commission has been critical of the de facto regime in Bolivia for its abuses — a regime which likely would not hold power but for the OAS’s intervention in the election.
It is clear the rot is thorough. This was not just a data slip. Not just an indefensible statistical analysis, officially delegitimizing an election. Not just an audit. This was not an objective, scientific investigation into the election, but a way of defending an indefensible analysis cooked up in advance. The OAS under Almagro is now visibly out of control. Its ostensible mission is to support the international order. It could start by dropping the United States’ two-century-old business of meddling in the Western Hemisphere.
A goby camouflaged within the branches of a red coral. (photo: Enric Sala/National Geographic)
'The World That Darwin Never Saw': Scientists Discover 30 New Marine Species in the Galapagos
Tiffany Duong, EcoWatch
Duong writes: "International marine scientists have discovered 30 new species in the deep waters off the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, highlighting how unique the ecosystems of the islands are as well as how little we know about the deep sea."
After Charles Darwin first visited in 1835, the Galapagos became famous for their biodiversity and for their endemic species found nowhere else in the world. Darwin, then 26, spent five weeks surveying the archipelago, reported Smithsonian Magazine.
"The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention," Darwin later said, reported Smithsonian Magazine. "Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else."
At the same time, the plants and animals he studied still showed a "marked relationship" to those on the mainland, leading Darwin to form the seeds of his groundbreaking Theory of Evolution, Smithsonian Magazine said. After publishing "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" in 1859, Darwin's theories cemented the Galapagos Islands as "hallowed scientific ground," a reputation that continues today, Smithsonian Magazine reported.
The magic is in the isolation. The removed geography of the islands from the rest of the world allowed for and forced species to adapt and evolve over time to survive their unique habitats on each island, according to WWF and Discovering Galapagos.
Even today, as conditions change, animals and plants continue to develop into new hybrids and species, adding to the islands' rich history. In 2017, a population of finches on the islands were discovered in the process of becoming a new species, reported BBC. In 2019, scientists found a species of giant tortoise on a remote Galapagos island that they hadn't seen alive for 110 years and that they'd feared extinct, reported AP News. As recently as February of this year, conservationists studied 30 giant tortoises partially descended from two extinct species, AP News reported.
"Evolution, in general, can happen very quickly," said Roger Butlin, a speciation expert talking about the finches, reported the BBC.
In the latest discovery, scientists from the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), the Galapagos National Park Directorate, the Ocean Exploration Trust (OET) and an international team of deep-sea experts identified 30 new deep-sea invertebrate species within the Galapagos Marine Reserve. They published their results in the journal Scientific Reports and called their discoveries "the world that Darwin never saw" in a CDF press release.
The species were found on seamounts, underwater mountains that do not break the ocean's surface, the release said. Until recently, these extinct volcanoes and the flourishing communities of organisms that live on them were largely unexplored.
"The deep-sea remains as earth's last frontier, and this study provides a sneak-peak into the least known communities of the Galapagos Islands," marine scientist and study leader Pelayo Salinas de León said, reported Yahoo!
Expedition crews used state-of-the-art Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) to explore up to depths of 3400 meters, the CDF release said. According to the release and Science Times, the new species of marine life include:
- 10 new species of bamboo corals and four new octocorals, including the first giant solitary soft coral in the Tropical Eastern Pacific;
- 1 new species of brittle star;
- 11 new sponge species; and
- 4 new species of squat lobsters.
"The many discoveries made on this expedition showcase the importance of deep-sea exploration to developing an understanding of our oceans…" OET Chief Scientist Nicole Raineault said, the CDF release stated.
According to Science Times and National Geographic, the Galapagos Marine Reserve protects these seamounts from fishing activity and deep-sea mining. The discovery came after Ecuador raised concerns about a massive Chinese fishing fleet operating on the edge of the Galapagos' protected waters, reported Al Jazeera.
Ecuador's former minister of the environment Yolanda Kakabadse told Public Radio International that the Galapagos should be "the last place on Earth to be affected by irresponsible actions of any sort," the news report said.
Salinas de León added, "These pristine seamounts are within the Galapagos Marine Reserve and are protected from destructive human practices such as fishing with bottom trawls or deep-sea mining that are known to have catastrophic impacts upon fragile communities. Now it is our responsibility to make sure they remain pristine for the generations to come," the CDF release said.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.