I've been reviewing publicly available documents in an attempt to figure out exactly what happened on Election Day (October 20th 2019) in Bolivia to cause the stoppage of the TREP (quick, unofficial vote count). This unexpected stoppage, followed by a late rally that expanded the MAS's lead just enough to win outright in the first round, led to accusations of electoral fraud that fueled a protest movement which eventually overthrew the government.
https://np.reddit.com/r/BOLIVIA/comments/e983ts/why_the_trep_was_suspended/
At first, this might not appear to be relevant to this community, but I believe the stoppage occurred because of communication failures between the administrator of the vote tabulation system and the cybersecurity team hired to audit and monitor that system. Crucially, the system administrator wasn't with the cybersecurity team during the election, so when he reconfigured the network without warning at a critical moment, the cybersecurity people were caught unaware. They tried multiple times to get into contact with him but failed, so they put out a 'maximum alert' to the election board which caused the halting of the preliminary vote count. I think my narrative, if correct, could be an interesting case study of deficient system administration and a lesson for the future.
The technical details seem like a real hurdle for most people's understanding of the story, so I hoped that by coming here I might get more feedback about those aspects and perhaps someone could fill in some of the holes in the story.
(Note: The public reports I used are linked at the end of the post, but they're all in Spanish. Whenever I quote from them within the post, I try to provide a translation in English.)
Thanks for your attention!
